


The Path We Were Forced to Follow

by BuddingAuthor



Category: James and the Giant Peach - Roald Dahl
Genre: Abuse, Backstory, Because of Reasons, Family, Fear, Gen, Hatred
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-15
Updated: 2017-05-29
Packaged: 2018-09-24 18:53:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 15
Words: 48,885
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9780494
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BuddingAuthor/pseuds/BuddingAuthor
Summary: Aunt Spiker and Aunt Sponge are portrayed as the villains in "James and the Giant Peach," but twenty years before they met James, they were just two young girls, abused and neglected by their mother. After the death of one of their older twin sisters, young Spiker and Sponge are horribly mistreated and forced to grow up too fast. From managing most of the housework at age eleven to running the entire family at age thirteen, and plenty of much worse things after that, Spiker's and Sponge's entire childhood was marred, leaving them with scars they'll never forget.





	1. Tears and Bruises

It’s often said that having twins runs in the family: a mother who’s a twin is more than twice as likely to give birth to a pair of twins herself. And that was certainly true for Sandra Harrisburg, who, having a twin brother herself, gave birth to a beautiful pair of twin girls on her thirty-first birthday. Her husband, Wendell, often called them her birthday miracle. Their names were Lillian and Lucille. And for four years everything went perfectly. The girls grew up and laughed and played, the epitome of what children should be.

But then life began to go downhill for Sandra. Wendell developed a serious respiratory infection, and the money demanded to keep him alive—always in a hospital—was far too much for Sandra to pay while still maintaining a healthy lifestyle. The house gradually grew more dingy; Lillian’s and Lucille’s bright eyes slowly faded; the entire family steadily grew thinner. Sandra worked herself to exhaustion to pay for Wendell’s hospital bills and for his medicine. And then everything got even worse.

It was only once: one night, one time she let her guard down, one mistake. But Sandra soon discovered she was pregnant with another set of twins. 

Wendell was absolutely furious when Sandra delivered the news, perched nervously on a hard wooden chair by his hospital bed. And Sandra didn’t blame him. She tried to remind him that the one time was only that, just  _ once _ ; but Wendell was rightly infuriated, and promptly declared he wanted nothing to do with Sandra, Lillian, or Lucille, ever again. (He died three weeks afterwards.) Sandra was left alone, nearly desolate, with two four-year-olds and soon two infants to look after. Life was not looking bright.

When the next two baby girls were born, Sandra tried to love them, but it was hard. If it hadn’t been for their existence, she’d still have Wendell and possibly a scrap of money. She wouldn’t be depriving herself of food for days on end and still listening to Lillian and Lucille moan softly that their stomachs hurt.  _ It’s not the new twins’ fault,  _ Sandra tried to remind herself. But… but… but it  _ was  _ really, wasn’t it? After all, if it wasn’t for them, none of this mess would have happened at all! Right?

Lillian and Lucille knew, too, that the new babies were the reason they were always short on food and money. Now five, their faces twisted with disgust every time “the new twins” were mentioned. They were losing attention, and they were on the verge of starvation.

It didn’t help, either, that when the babies were born, they didn’t prove to be as beautiful as Lillian and Lucille had been. They were much less… attractive. You just didn’t feast your eyes on them. You looked away.

They were eventually named Spiker and Sponge (Sponge’s name was the result of a complete accident on Lillian’s and Lucille’s part), and they grew up in mostly silence. Sandra just couldn’t seem to love little Spiker and Sponge as much as she loved Lillian and Lucille. She still held a grudge against the youngest set of twins, and four small children was just too much for a destitute single mother to handle. So when there was only enough food for two people one night, it went to Lillian and Lucille. When there was a precious cup of milk to go around, it was all right if Lucille took a big gulp, but the cup was snatched from Spiker if even a tiny half-droplet trickled down her baby chin. The two youngest girls grew up even more malnourished and overlooked than their older sisters, and by the time they were three, it was beginning to get to them. They received little love from their mother, and their older sisters often threatened them. Lillian and Lucille were not mean people— they really did love their sisters, and when they bullied Spiker and Sponge, it was only because they sometimes they grew annoyed with them, as siblings do—but their threats began to take a toll on Spiker’s and Sponge’s well-being. And their mother grew no closer to the younger twins as they aged.

One day, in the stuttering, babbling speech of a three-year-old, little Sponge walked up to her mother, who was hurriedly counting coins at a small table, and demanded to know why Lillian had gotten to sleep with the lone blanket the family owned the previous night. Sponge had woken up nearly every hour, shivering with cold, but when she crawled over to Lillian and asked to share the blanket she’d been pushed away by her sleepy eight-year-old sister and told to go back to sleep, because she was disturbing everybody else in the room where the entire family slept. Afraid of the fist that Lillian had threatened her with before, Sponge crawled back to her place and lay awake shivering for hours more.

That morning, when Sponge toddled up to ask her preoccupied mother about the blanket, Sandra suddenly couldn’t take it anymore. She was busy and overworked, trying to keep food in her children’s mouths; she was starving and cold. And she jumped up, slapped her three-year-old daughter across the face, knocked her down with a well-placed blow to her shoulder, and screamed at her to leave the room. Sponge staggered from the room, finding comfort in Lucille’s strong arms; but she never quite trusted her mother after that.

It got worse with each passing year. Lillian and Lucille were never abused, and they were constantly favored. With the younger girls, however, it was a different story. Spiker had a permanent scar down the side of her face from a carving knife her mother had flung at her in a fit of rage when she was six. Hardly a day went by when one of the younger twins wasn’t hit or punched or slapped. The one good thing that happened was that Lillian and Lucille gradually developed a much more positive relationship with their sisters, so that helped Spiker and Sponge somewhat; but not a lot.

One day, when Lillian and Lucille were thirteen and Spiker and Sponge were eight, all four children had gone down to the grassy park about a mile from the family’s house. There was a wide river running through the middle of a glade with a rather strong current, but the younger girls begged to explore the other side. So Lillian and Lucille looked at each other and shrugged. Lillian pulled a coil of rope from where she  secretly always kept it in the hole of a tree, and quickly threw it so it wrapped around the branch of a tree that hung out over the river, forming a rope swing.

Lillian grabbed the rope first and swung across to the other side, landing safely on the grass. She threw it back to her twin, shouting for her to send Spiker and Sponge across first for safety, in between two older girls. Lucille nodded, lifting Sponge onto the rope and instructing her to hold on tight. Sponge made it across the river safely; a few moments later, so did Spiker; and then Lillian. The four girls played in the meadow for nearly an hour, then they decided to head back. Again, Lillian went first; Sponge followed; then Spiker.

Then Lucille took hold of the rope and went to swing herself across. But what with seven trips back and forth across the river that day, and after being used for months previously, the rope had begun to fray. Lucille’s weight, slight as she was, proved too much for it. Finally, as she was swinging across, the rope snapped, and with a scream, Lucille fell into the river. The current had picked up. She was flung about and twisted underwater. Lillian, crying out, was kneeling at the bank, trying to grab her. The two girls’ hands touched, then slipped past each other; the force of the river slammed Lucille’s head into a rock. Blood streamed from her head, dyeing the river water a sickly shade of red; then her body was tossed into a calmer section, and her sisters could see from the way that she lay limp and unmoving, like a wilted flower, that she would not wake up again.

The three girls crumpled on the riverbank, and they stayed there for a long time, hugging each other and crying. And then, slowly, Lillian got up. Wincing and shuddering, she fished her twin’s body from the creek, hauling it ashore and profusely refusing the help of her younger sisters. She turned away from Spiker and Sponge and carried her sister’s dead body home— head bowed, tears streaming from her eyes— not speaking a word to either of the younger twins.

Lucille’s death was an awful blow for Sandra. Lucille was one of the two girls that Sandra had wanted and that she loved. When she saw Lillian standing there, holding Lucille’s limp body, Sandra immediately turned on the girls she’d never asked for. She put the blame squarely on Spiker’s and Sponge’s young shoulders.

It was a horrible burden for two such young girls to bear. And the most awful part was that, although it hadn’t in any way been their fault, they could talk themselves into thinking that it had been. Like,  _ If only I hadn’t insisted we go over to the other side of the river _ , or,  _ If only I’d let Lucille go in front of me. Maybe my weight wouldn’t have been enough to break that rope.  _ Or even,  _ If only I hadn’t been there at all. _

Lillian took Lucille’s death as hard as her mother. Lucille’s twin became secluded and forlorn. All of the wonderful times she’d spent with Spiker and Sponge seemed to vanish into thin air. She refused her mother’s company and completely ignored her younger sisters. The only family member she wanted was the one who she couldn’t reach.

And slowly, Lillian’s grief began to lessen and her fury at the entire world, her absolute hatred in response to Lucille’s death, began to increase. At only thirteen years old, the white-hot anger that rose up in her was all-consuming. She could not manage the emotions. And so when she saw Sandra begin to take out her anger on Spiker and Sponge, Lillian began to follow suit. It was the only outlet she could find for her anger. She was suffering from intense post-traumatic stress disorder—swinging wildly between fury and despair—but Sandra was too blindsided by her own grief (and her own stress- and grief-induced schizoaffective disorder) to notice and get her daughter the help she needed.

Lillian was so furious all she wanted to do most of the time was slap and kick and stab. And so she began using her younger siblings as a punching bag. Her fury did not lessen. Neither did the amount of abuse she doled out.

Lillian never laughed anymore. She never even smiled. And her eyes constantly blazed with fury and grief. Her emotions were still spiraling wildly out of control, and once she started hurting her siblings, she found she couldn’t stop.

For months, Lillian’s behavior would be completely unpredictable. She swung between blazing with dangerous fury and trembling violently, sobbing  and screaming Lucille’s name. Spiker and Sponge always wanted to comfort her when she was a crying mess, but it was hard, because ten minutes later she’d be up, still shaking, often still crying, but pinning one of the younger girls to the wall and beating them furiously for seemingly no reason whatsoever. And both twins were taking increasing abuse from Sandra, as pain and stress began to overwhelm her. It was a very rough situation: Spiker and Sponge knew exactly what would infuriate their tormentors, and they did their absolute best to avoid it, but it wasn’t always possible. Sandra, always clever, laid traps when she was talking with the girls and nearly always caught them, finding excuses or justifications for torture. Lillian, meanwhile, could fly into a rage over any little thing, and she would immediately start in with the abuse. 

One morning in particular, about four months after Lucille’s death, was especially brutal. Lillian had grown extremely angry at Spiker for not satisfactorily cleaning the counters. Apparently there was still a lot of food and dirt littering them, albeit debris that nobody but Lillian could see. Lillian started to holler at Spiker, who bit her lip and then summoned the courage to protest.  She had slaved over that kitchen for two hours, and there was no dirt on the counters; and she was not going to take Lillian’s anger lying down. And although Spiker wasn’t usually one to stand up for herself, today, she’d reached her breaking point. In a low but steely voice, Spiker quietly asserted that she had left absolutely no dirt on the countertops.

This was about the worst thing Spiker could have done. Infuriated by a show of defiance—and from the usually more submissive twin, no less!—Lillian flew into a dangerous, violent rage. She seized the first thing that came to hand—a dilapidated old clock hanging on the wall—and flung it at Spiker’s head. 

The missile came too quickly for Spiker to avoid, and it hit her face with a crash. The clock shattered, pieces of glass, plastic, and wire flying everywhere. Spiker face was covered in innumerable small, bloody cuts, and she dropped to her knees, her hands covering her head, her defiance draining from her in an instant. The crash and the screams brought Sandra and Sponge running, Sandra still with a hand on Sponge’s collar and wielding an umbrella threateningly.

Upon seeing her twin sister—who was still just eight years old—on the ground clutching a bloody face, Sponge gave a scream of terror, fury, and concern, and wrenched herself from her mother’s grip. She threw herself on top of her sister, between Sponge’s trembling body and Lillian’s raised foot. Lillian kicked Sponge hard instead, not able to reach the other girl, and though Sponge screamed and doubled over in pain, she wouldn’t get out of the way and let Lillian beat Sponge. The entire time Lillian was screaming obscenities—including some words that Spiker’s and Sponge’s young ears hadn’t been acquainted with yet—and yelling some brutal, horrible insults at the girls.

Sponge had always been much less submissive, and today she couldn’t take Lillian’s abuse lying down anymore. Sponge didn’t care about what Lillian was saying to  _ her _ , but it infuriated her beyond belief to hear what Lillian was saying to Spiker. Wrenching herself up to her knees, Sponge stared into Lillian’s eyes. “Stop!” she moaned pleadingly, shaking with anger. “Don’t say that to her!” Lillian just glared at her, her entire face flushed with fury. Angry too at Sponge’s show of obstinance, Sandra held out her umbrella to Lillian, which the older girl took; she began striking Sponge’s face and shoulders with it. Sponge doubled over, protecting her head; but then she forced herself up and screamed, “Is this what Lucille would want you to do?”

At once the blows stopped. Lillian just stood there, stock still, frozen in the position she’d been in with the umbrella still raised threateningly. She didn’t move, didn’t speak, just stood there. And then she flung the umbrella at the far wall and collapsed to the ground, screaming and beating her fists against the floor. She writhed and shook, yelling out Lucille’s name over and over again, and other phrases too:  _ why did you leave me! _ ,  _ I can’t live without you! _ ,  _ you weren’t supposed to die!  _ Spiker and Sponge looked at each other. They weren’t going to pretend they didn’t miss Lillian desperately too, and part of them wanted to comfort Lillian, but another part of them was not ready to forgive her for what had just transpired. Sandra was there, whispering in Lillian’s ear; but Lillian wrenched herself away and scrambled up to her bedroom, slamming the door. 

She did not come out for five days. She locked the door and wouldn’t open it for anyone, not Sandra, not either of her sisters with food. She wouldn’t even speak to them, besides six words: 

_ Go away. Leave me alone. _

_ Go! _

And although it took days, Lillian did eventually ventured from her room, darker and more merciless; and the horror and pain and abuse started all over again. Her anger controlled her fully now, and Spiker and Sponge were forced to heart-wrenchingly accept that there was no way that the smiling, laughing Lillian from a year before was not coming back. And slowly, over the course of what seemed like decades, they learned to deal with it.


	2. Sisters, Friends, Protectors

Weeks, months, then years passed, with agonizing slowness. Tempers got higher, rifts grew deeper, pain grew more intense. Spiker and Sponge, as they aged, began to develop their own natural personalities—which, like the girls themselves, were similar yet different. Most notably, they felt emotions differently: when they were hurt, Spiker felt despair deeper, and Sponge felt more anger. They both allowed those emotions to build up, which could lead to awful breakdowns and outbursts (Spiker was more prone to tears, while Sponge’s pent-up emotions exploded in storms of white-hot rage). Spiker was also more logical, although coldly and cruelly so; and Sponge was more artistic, with a talent for poetry and writing—and, she would later discover, theatre. Spiker always thought situations through more thoroughly than her sister, but she was also significantly less prone to standing up for herself.

What with a neverending torrent of abuse—both physical and mental—from both their mother and older sister, Spiker and Sponge did not fare well during their tween or teen years. By the time they were twelve, their mother began delegating most of the household work to them, even work completely unsuitable for twelve-year-old girls. Desperate, chronically hungry, and very near hopeless, Spiker and Sponge, perhaps surprisingly, became closer. They were smart and resourceful, and they worked as a team, covering chores the other hadn’t gotten to and watching out for any sign the other was in danger. They looked out for each other and protected each other, as each of them took increasingly more abuse. They “invented” little hand signals to communicate silently; they learned how to read each other with a single glance; they even developed a secret hideout a ways away from the house, and whenever they could escape, they’d meet there.

As the years crawled by, Spiker and Sponge grew farther and farther apart from Lillian and Sandra. Trust grew lesser and lesser. And eventually, one morning, the relationship between Spiker and Sponge and their older sister finally snapped, with no possibility of it ever healing. The younger twins were almost twelve at the time; Lillian was sixteen.

The morning began regularly enough. Spiker and Sponge stirred at around five o’clock, before the sun rose and long before Sandra and Lillian awoke. They rebandaged their overworked hands, which were cracked and bloody from callouses that had been torn and stress that had been too greatly applied, and wiped a bit of water on their faces to attempt to wake themselves up. The they crept silently upstairs and began a few morning household chores in comfortable, companionable silence.

At about six o’clock, they started cooking breakfast for Sandra and Lillian. This made them more uptight, because the tiniest mistake would be immediately noticed and swiftly punished. So they focused, their bodies tense and nervous.

About fifteen minutes later, Sandra strode in, silently grabbed the plate that Sponge held out towards her, sat down, and attacked her breakfast with a fork. Spiker and Sponge watched with bated breath; the two eleven-year-olds held hands tightly under the table. Sandra chewed, nodded slightly and decided not to complain, then snapped her fingers and barked “Water.” Spiker scrambled to get a glass and the jug of water; she set it down and began to pour. In her hurry, however, she spilled a considerable amount of liquid on the table.

In a flash, Sandra backhanded her daughter across the jaw and knocked her to the ground. Sponge immediately took a towel and started cleaning up the mess before helping her sister back to her feet. Sandra glared at the two of them; Spiker hastily filled the glass of water and pushed it across the table to her mother. Sandra kept her gaze fixed on her, mouth twisting; then she turned to Sponge and said curtly, “Go wake Lillian.”

Sponge, biting her lip, crept out of the kitchen with a quick reassuring glance at her sister and started up the stair towards Lillian’s room. She knocked quietly; then, when there was no response, she held her breath and silently entered.

Lillian was still fast asleep. Sponge started to edge towards the bed, trying not to trip over anything and startle Lillian. When she got closer, she could hear Lillian murmuring in her sleep. Over and over again, the same word, the same name, and it wasn’t a surprise: “ _ Lucille… Lucille… _ ” Her face was calm, serene. And then her face began to grow more concerned, more stressed. She kept repeating her sister’s name, but now it was panicked, desperate. Her voice grew more shrill and she began to scream Lucille’s name. And then all of a sudden she sat bolt upright, her face flushed, screaming: “No! No, no, no!”

The first thing Lillian saw, waking up from her nightmare, was Sponge, still standing hesitantly by her bed. And her eyes narrowed and started to blaze with more fury than Sponge had ever seen. Startled and scared, the younger girl took a step backwards.

“ _ You _ .” Lillian spit the word with a hatred even Sponge was unaccustomed to. “ _ You  _ are the reason Lucille is dead.  _ You  _ caused her death. You wanted to kill her!  _ You _ —!” 

Sponge suddenly felt her skin alight with fury; her vision was overtaken by a red haze of blazing anger. This was not okay. She had sobbed over her sister’s dead body, she had cried herself to sleep for days on end following Lucille’s death. She was destroyed by it, grief-stricken and pained. She had not meant to kill Lucille; she never ever would have even considered such a thing in any corner of her mind. She, in no way, shape, or form, had ever wanted to see her sister dead. She hadn’t! She  _ hadn’t _ ! And to blame her for her sister’s death, and to accuse her of murder, was absolutely, unforgivably wrong. Lillian had no right to say that. Spiker and Sponge had been forced to deal with Lucille’s death with astonishing rapidity and no help from their mother or older sister; it wasn’t fair that Lillian could just lie here and throw out completely false and unfair accusations like it was no big deal. Lillian was a traitor, a monster and a witch; she was the very definition of pure evil. Sponge had known that; but this morning had gone too far, even for Lillian.

Sponge stepped forwards, hands clenched in fists. “Take that back,” she growled threateningly, her eyes blazing. “I  _ never  _ wanted to see her dead. Take that back!”

“Liar.” Lillian’s voice was quiet and cold as steel. “You meant to kill her. You  _ wanted  _ to.”

“I would  _ never  _ want a thing like that! Take that back, Lillian; you monster!  _ Take that back _ !”

“But it’s true.” Lillian rose from the bed, looking mercilessly down into her sister’s eyes. “Her death was your fault. And it was intentional.” 

Lillian sprang suddenly at Sponge, who raised her fists furiously. But Lillian was five years older, and she took the younger girl down easily. Lillian stunned Sponge with a harsh, disorienting blow to her head, then proceeded to thrash her soundly, smashing a collection of sharp-edged ceramic decorations over her head. The punishment was made all the worse by the fact that Sponge kept yelling furiously at Lillian and struggling to fight back; and Lillian beat her without mercy.  By the time the older girl was done, Sponge was left lying on the floor, blood soaking her clothes, barely able to moan in agony, but brimming with fury. 

What Lillian had done was unforgivable. And as far as Sponge was concerned, there was no going back.

About five minutes later, Spiker came hesitantly in, tears flooding into her eyes as she saw her sister in a state of semi-consciousness on the floor. Spiker dropped to the ground, breathing in gasps; “What did she do to you?” she cried. “What did she say?”

Sponge groaned, sucked in a breath, and told her everything, in a voice quaking with rage. Spiker gasped, sobbing helplessly—“No;  _ no!  _ Please! No, we didn’t! She’s—oh God, we’d never do something like that!”—and then she crumpled to the floor, distraught.

Suddenly Sponge sat up.

“Lillian is our  _ sister _ ,” she spat. “She’s our  _ family _ , for God’s sake! I don’t care what she’s going through; as our biological family, she  _ cannot  _ treat us like that. She  _ cannot!  _ That crosses the line. That—I don’t  _ care  _ what she’s done before!  _ That  _ is too much!”

Spiker sniffled, silent tears still streaming down our cheeks. “So she’s not our family anymore,” she sniffed brokenly. “Isn’t it as simple as that? She hasn’t—she hasn’t treated”—she broke off into a flood of sobs, then regained control—“she hasn’t  _ treated  _ us like family for years, so why—why do we keep calling her our sister? She’s not. She’s  _ not _ , Sponge, simple as that. And Sandra’s not our mother either. Blood—blood doesn’t make a family, Sponge. Just because she has our DNA doesn’t make her our sister. Family’s not just blood and genetics. It’s got to be  _ more  _ than that.”

She slumped over in sobs. Sponge, touched, reached out and embraced her, wrapping strong, protective arms around her. Despite her anger, Sponge felt tears in her own eyes too. And when she looked up, all of her fury had drained from her.

“You’re right,” Sponge said softly. “Of course you’re right. They’re not our family. And we’re not going to call them that from here on.”

Spiker sniffled in desperation, still desperately, despairingly trying to get her point across. “They’re not family. They’re just  _ not _ .”

Sponge hugged her again. “I know. I know,” she whispered. “They’re not.”


	3. Too Much Pain to Handle

Mentally disowning both their mother and sister was surprisingly easy. Somebody who tortures you, abuses you, and beats you incessantly is clearly  _ not  _ your family. Spiker and Sponge suddenly didn’t have to pretend they were. Lillian, who grew even more abusive as the years passed, in particular was the very definition of not-family.

One morning she called for somebody to cook her breakfast. This was hardly unusual: every morning she snapped for Spiker or for Sponge to make her eggs. But this morning was different. This morning she didn’t use either one of her sisters’ names. This time she just yelled “Girl!” That hurt more than Spiker or Sponge could express; it cut straight to their hearts, deeper than any knife ever could. It seemed to be the norm in their lives now.

There comes a point in life where a certain amount of pain is too much for any decent person to take. And at that point, the pain begins to become something entirely different. It begins to become hatred. Hatred at somebody or something first; then, if there’s enough pain that is converted to anger, hatred at the entire world. By the time they were thirteen, Spiker and Sponge were both furious at everyone and everything. The grass in their hideout had been brutally attacked with spades and fingernails because they were angry at the place that had once sheltered them. Their shoes had been torn off and flung across the fields more times than could be counted. Their hatred for everything was overwhelming and all-consuming. Every time their mother or their sister—or, rather, their  _ ex-mother _ and their  _ ex-sister _ —summoned them by calling “Girl!” or ordered them about or gave them a smack on the head for not heeding their orders quick enough; then Spiker’s and Sponge’s anger flooded up into their body, making them see red. It was nearly impossible to not throw the frying pan at the wall when Lillian requested eggs, or shove the broom into Sandra’s hands when she demanded the entire house swept. Spiker and Sponge were ordered to start calling both Sandra and Lillian “ma’am,” regardless of the situation; Lillian—their own biological sister—flew into a rage if that term of respect wasn’t used.

There seemed to be only one antidote to Spiker’s and Sponge’s anger, only one thing that helped quell their rage. And it was simple, but to an outsider it would have been horrifying. Spiker and Sponge could be calmed down by seeing other people in pain.

It could be as simple as a child crying just in earshot. It could be a baby bird fallen out of its nest with a badly broken wing. It could be a rabbit with a pair of back legs that had been mutilated by a fox’s jaws, or a toddler falling and scraping up their arm.

One morning the twins were on a mission to buy, with some of Sandra’s meager spare money, a dozen eggs from the marketplace. Somehow they’d talked Sandra into letting them both go, so they were walking hand in hand. They were just passing the greengrocer’s stall when Spiker stopped, looking with hungry eyes upon the scene.

A mother was standing over her son, who couldn’t have been more than ten. The boy was lying on the ground with a nasty gash running down his left cheek. His mother held a crude metal spatula, coated with rust and what seemed to be the boy’s blood, threatening her son with it. The boy was pleading, but the mother was unrelenting; as Spiker and Sponge watched, she brought the spatula down on the boy’s already bloody cheek. The boy gave a scream of agony.

Spiker and Sponge stood in silence for a moment. Then Sponge muttered under her breath, “That’s barely a fraction of the pain we face every day.”

Spiker gave a mirthless laugh. “Nobody else in the world feels the pain we do on a daily basis. At least now and then some people get a taste of what it’s like.”

Sponge turned back towards the road and continued towards the egg stall, taking immense satisfaction at the sound of another crack of the spatula on the boy’s cheek and another of the boy’s cries. He would never feel pain to the degree that she felt it every day, but hey: the world was punishing some other people too, and now they knew what it felt like. Besides, she hated them all, and she would love to see everybody in this marketplace drop to their knees and writhe in agony, letting out horrible screams. Better yet would be if she could be the one inflicting that pain.

_ Someday,  _ she promised,  _ I’ll get back at them. Everybody. But especially Sandra. And Lillian. Oh yes, I’ll get back at Lillian. _

Spiker and Sponge didn’t even notice February 8, 1945. They didn’t have a calendar available. But Lillian and Sandra certainly did notice—and they knew, too, what made that day stand out.

It was the younger girls’ fourteenth birthday.

That day, Sandra and Lillian worked the girls even harder than usual, offering no explanation for the sudden onslaught of grueling chores, despite repeated, bewildered questions. Finally, though, late in the afternoon, Sandra let it drop. “After all, you’re fourteen now,” she said, in answer to Spiker’s desperate plea. She glanced up at her daughter, who was precariously balanced on a rickety, rotten wooden stepladder, washing the windows with a soapy rag. “You can afford to work harder.”

Spiker nearly fell off the ladder in shock. As it was, she just barely caught herself, and stared with an open mouth at Sandra. She didn’t say a word, just shaking her head. And she stood there, frozen, so long, that Sandra eventually reached up, clouted her on the ear, and demanded that she get back to work. Still too stunned to say a word, Spiker, numb, went back to her task.

Fourteen years old. It was the first birthday they hadn’t noticed. Sandra and Lillian probably knew that, too; they  _ knew  _ the girls had lost track of the date and didn’t know.

_ And you didn’t care enough to tell us. _

That was when the relationship between Spiker and Sponge and their mother, Sandra, snapped.

Days passed jaggedly in grueling pain, the time between them blurred; Sandra and Lillian grew more brutal, and they held back nothing when it came to their punishments, both physical and psychological. On one particularly awful day that still haunted both girls’ nightmares, Sandra and Lillian had pinned Spiker to the ground using a combination of furniture and rope, and screamed at her for nearly sixty minutes. Over the course of that brutal hour, Sandra and Lillian had done absolutely everything they could to make Spiker feel utterly alone and unloved; and due to her natural tendencies, they broke through the hard, confident appearance she put on in front of them and really began to damage her after about five minutes. Their words that day truly hurt the girl, really hurting her perhaps beyond repair. The worst of their blows had been Lillian’s cruel insult, insisting that Sponge was only pretending to love Spiker and that she truly didn’t care about her at all—look at how, for instance, she hadn’t come to try to defend Spiker now (in truth, Spiker’s twin was locked in the basement, unable to reach or talk to her). That day was astronomically damaging to Spiker, destroying her from the inside out. After it was finally over, she had sobbed in her sister’s arms for over an hour, hardly able to breathe with the force of her tears; and Sponge didn’t know what to do to make the nightmare seem more bearable to her sister.

Other horrible punishments flooded those years; some stood out more noticeably than others. There was the time that Sponge had been burned with boiling water for forgetting to mow the lawn, causing scars that seemed to never heal; there was the time that Spiker had been attacked by a neighbor’s Rottweiler dog as punishment for not properly making Sandra’s bed; there was the time that Sponge hadn’t been allowed to eat for a week straight, being forced to watch her sister consume her own food under Lillian’s strict supervision. There was all that and more, each one haunting the girls’ nightmares for a week until a new particularly dreadful day cropped up to take its place.

When they were fifteen, Spiker’s and Sponge’s already frankly miserable lives got worse, with the delivery of stunning, devastating news. Sandra told her daughters early one July day, standing in the garden with Lillian by her side. Neither one of them wasted any time beating around the bush; instead, Lillian simply opened her cruel lips and said,

“There’s a man in town who’s expressed interest in you two. He needs help around the house and asked us about potentially purchasing you. He’s coming here to pick you up today, in about ten minutes.”

Lillian’s words hit Spiker and Sponge like a brutal knife. They stood there, shell-shocked, mouths hanging open; panicked. This was the first time they’d heard of any such plans, and it shook them to their cores: the sudden, frantic delivery of the news; the cold, unsympathetic looks in their mother’s and sister’s eyes; the absolute unbelievability of the entire thing; but perhaps more than anything else, the word Lillian had used to describe the deal. He’s expressed interest in you, she’d said; in potentially  _ purchasing  _ you. 

Purchasing. Like a pair of shoes, or a garden tool, or a house; but not like a living, breathing, sentient human being.

Spiker and Sponge just stood there frozen for a few seconds as their minds processed the sudden, brutal news. And as they started to grasp it, they both began to tremble and gasp with the terror and the pain. And then Sponge spun to stare incredulously, furiously at Sandra and Lillian.

“What?” The girl’s eyes, wild and fear-filled, shot to Sandra. Her own face was flushed and blotchy, and she was trembling. Beside her, Sponge could feel Spiker shaking horribly. The girls looked at each other with panic and terror, and they could each see that the other had tears in her eyes. Because as much as they didn’t want to stay with Sandra and Lillian, it was another thing entirely to be the property of an adult man they’d never met before in their lives. It was terrifying.

Spiker shut her eyes, trying to absorb the painful news. It was just so wrong! She couldn’t understand it, couldn’t handle it. Tears leaked from beneath closed eyelids, streaking her face. Sponge put a gentle arm around her sister’s trembling shoulder; but then Sandra grabbed Spiker’s collar. “Stop crying,” she demanded threateningly, giving the girl a rough shove. Spiker staggered backwards, trying but failing to catch her balance before she fell backwards onto the muddy ground.

That was too much. Sponge gave Sandra a hard push in retaliation. “Don’t push her!” she screamed, eyes blazing with anger. You couldn’t make plans to sell your fifteen-year-old daughter to a grown man for a measly sum of cash, then punish her when she cried out of sheer terror. That was going way too far, even for Sandra.  _ Way  _ too far. Angrily, Sponge reached up a hand to slap her mother; but then she felt a strong, unfamiliar grip lock around her wrist from behind and force her hand down.

“Ah, so I see we have a defiant one,” crooned a rough, weathered voice. Her hand was released, but at the same time Sponge felt the sudden, sharp sting of a slap to her cheek, and she spun. Behind her stood an older man, perhaps sixty, with a  scraggly beard and mass of white hair. He was wearing heavy overalls and a dark plaid shirt. His eyes glittered dangerously. “We’ll soon tame that.”

“Ah, Robert!” Sandra cried pleasantly. “How good to see you again!”

The man—Robert?—nodded curtly. “It’s still Mr. O’Hara to you.” Shoving Sponge, who was frozen with fear, away, he grabbed Spiker’s collar and hauled her to her feet. Spiker still looked absolutely petrified, a look now shared by her sister as they cowered together against Mr. O’Hara’s snarling face. The girls jerked and they clutched each other’s hands tightly, gripping them with so much force that their knuckles were white. Tears of pure, sheer, overwhelming terror beaded in Spiker’s eyes and began to slip down her cheeks too. The sisters stood there, trembling and frozen in fear, more fear than they could remember feeling in—well, ever.

Then Mr. O’Hara took two rough ropes from around his belt and begin to unwind them. As he continued, Spiker and Sponge could see that they were lassos of some kind; they had a loop at one end, perfect for looping around a tree branch—

_ Or a human neck. _

Spiker shuddered and jerked back as she suddenly saw Mr. O’Hara’s true intent. Crying, gasping, with tears streaming down her cheeks, tried to escape, but Lillian grabbed her and shoved her towards the man. Smiling viciously, Mr. O’Hara looped the rope around Spiker’s neck, like a collar; and began to tighten it. And he kept tightening it; and he didn’t seem to have any plans to stop.

First the rope held Spiker’s neck firm; then it began to cut harshly into her skin. It was too tight; finally it began to make it hard to breath, then impossible. Spiker gasped, trying to force air into her lungs, but Mr. O’Hara just kept tightening the restraint. She began to cough and splutter, her face turning blue. Sponge was hollering at Mr. O’Hara, shouting, “Can’t you see you’re choking her? Can’t you see she can’t breath? Stop, you idiot!  _ Stop! _ ” But Mr. O’Hara was just laughing cruelly. Spiker felt lightheaded and dizzy; the edges of her peripheral vision were blurring and turning black. Suddenly she could feel her sister’s hands scrabbling at the rope, trying to snap it or loosen it, but she wasn’t strong enough. In desperation, Sponge attacked the rope with her teeth, hoping to bite through. But the rope was too thick and Mr. O’Hara was standing there; he shoved Sponge away, still laughing maniacally. Spiker’s eyes were bulging and the blackness was just about to overwhelm her entire consciousness—

And then Mr. O’Hara loosened the rope. Spiker dropped to her hands and knees, head pressed to the ground, coughing and gasping. She was gulping air into her lungs. Sponge was by her side, an arm around her shoulders, whispering softly to her. Slowly, Spiker felt her body fill with air, and she began to slow down her breathing and stop gasping. She looked up; Sponge offered her a hand, and Spiker nervously got to her feet.

Spiker was trembling badly. She wanted to burst into tears. But with every fiber of her being, she was fighting the impulse, fighting the urge. She couldn’t cry in front of the frankly evil man who still held the rope that was loosely looped around her neck. He was now standing by Sandra, dropping coins into her hands—the coins that represented everything Spiker and Sponge were worth to their mother and sister.

Spiker bit down hard on her lip, trying to force back tears.  _ Don’t cry. Just don’t cry. _

Spiker’s breath was rough and she could feel her throat starting to tighten up. And as much as she didn’t want to show her pain, to her eternal shame, a strangled sob was torn from her lips. She couldn’t catch her breath and her was heart hammering.

And then Sponge threw her arms around her sister, wrapping her in a strong embrace. They both felt tears in their eyes, and fought back the impulse to cry. Neither of them sobbed, but they were both shaking and gasping and trembling; their hearts were pounding unpleasantly, making them quiver and close their eyes in fear. They clutched each other tighter, not wanting to let go, not wanting to abandon the safe haven they found in each other’s arms—

And then a thick rope dropped heavily over Sponge’s head. With a sudden jolt it was tightened around her neck—not so she couldn’t breathe, but so it was clenched and controlling. Sponge’s eyes were blazing with fury, but she couldn’t do anything as Mr. O’Hara tightened the rope around Spiker’s neck too, and then gave both ropes a jerk. Spiker and Sponge were ripped from each other’s arms and stumbled roughly forward. In desperation, they glanced at each other; but they couldn’t do anything as they were dragged incessantly ahead.

And finally, as one, the girls cast a glance back at Sandra and Lillian. Sandra’s eyes were clear and cold, and her face was set, cruel. But Lillian’s eyes had grown cloudy and disconnected. She was now staring off into the distance, not looking at her sisters. Spiker opened her mouth and cried out Lillian’s name; Lillian made eye contact, and fury consumed her face, but her eyes stayed unfocused.  And then Mr. O’Hara tugged on the rope and slapped Spiker, and they rounded a bend; and finally Sandra and Lillian were out of view.

And the girls were alone with Mr. O’Hara. 


	4. Like Hell on Earth

The girls’ new guardian— _ owner _ —very quickly made it clear what his expectations for for their behavior would be. And he did it by example.

The man strode up to his front door and undid the five locks that secured the house. He dragged the girls through, then finally,  _ finally  _ untied the ropes from around their necks. Preemptively, before the girls even moved, he snapped, “ _ Don’t  _ touch each other.” Spiker and Sponge didn’t move, standing absolutely stock still, too afraid to even breathe heavily.

It was about ten o’clock in the morning. Mr. O’Hara handed a folded piece of paper to Sponge, who nervously and apprehensively unfolded it. She leaned over slightly so her sister could read over her shoulder. What they saw made both of their spirits sink.

It was a list of chores. It could keep them busy for nearly a month; and if they were overworked at the rate they’d been under Sandra, they could probably complete the list in a week. Mr. O’Hara raised his eyebrows at them.

“This is your list of chores for today,” he said curtly, and both girls’ jaws dropped. He put a hand roughly under Spiker’s chin and jerked upwards, shutting Spiker’s mouth with the sharp click of the girl’s teeth colliding. “If you finish any time after 7:00, you do not get dinner. You do not sleep until you are done. I will wake you promptly at 6:00 every morning. And, apart from the words ‘Yes, sir’, you do not speak at all.”

Sponge looked uncertainly from the paper to Mr. O’Hara, weighing her options. Finally she spoke.

“Sir, no disrespect intended, but this list—it’s just imposs—” 

Mr. O’Hara slapped Sponge’s cheek hard. He was much stronger than Sandra or Lillian, and the blow made Sponge recoil. Unbidden tears from the pain sprang into her eyes. “You do not speak,” he repeated quietly, dangerously.

Sponge looked back at the paper. Did Mr. O’Hara not understand what an impossible task this was? “I understand, sir,” she said, more fearfully now, “but the thing is—”

Mr. O’Hara suddenly cocked a fist back and punched Sponge hard in the stomach. She dropped to her knees, the wind knocked out of her, clutching her stomach and gasping. Spiker cried out and instantly knelt by her sister’s side, an arm around her shoulders. Sponge could feel shameful tears welling in her eyes, but she would not shed them this time, not here, not now. She gasped a few times, forcing her eyes to dry, and then—with Spiker’s help—found the strength to stand back up. Sponge opened her mouth and was about to speak again when Spiker squeezed her shoulder, shaking her head: a clear message of  _ don’t say anything.  _ Sponge looked at her sister and her eyes protested, insisting that she needed to make it clear that they couldn’t complete the list in just a day; but again, Spiker shook her head.  _ Don’t provoke him. _

And so Sponge didn’t say anything, albeit slightly unhappily. Mr. O’Hara cackled. “Oh yes! You two are fast learners!” His maniacal laughter made Spiker and Sponge cower and clutch each other; then he suddenly broke off, shoved the girls so they stumbled backwards, and strode from the room, leaving the girls alone with the list of chores.

As soon as the door closed behind him, Spiker dropped to her knees, pressing her face into her palms. Sponge knelt by her, concerned and bewildered. What was wrong with Spiker? Was she okay? Had Mr. O’Hara done something to her that Sponge hadn’t seen?

And then, with a choked sob, Spiker collapsed, lying on her side, gasping and crying. Tears flooded from her eyes and cascaded down her cheeks. Her chest was constricted; she was struggling to get air into her lungs. She couldn’t form a coherent sentence, couldn’t speak a single word. She was just crying and crying.

Sponge stroked her sister’s hair worriedly. Although Spiker had always been more prone to tears than her sister (a by-product of her natural tendency to feel despair more deeply and anger less so), she certainly didn’t like to cry. She said it made her feel weaker, more susceptible to bullying. And she’d already bitten back tears today, in Sandra’s garden. So what was it? Was she that overwhelmed? Sponge didn’t believe it. Spiker had gotten so much stronger over the past few years—her last breakdown of this magnitude had been  _ years  _ ago, after a particularly brutal confrontation with Lillian, and that was partly pain-induced. She was too brave to be just overwhelmed.

As it turned out, Spiker was feeling completely betrayed. Over the years, hatred for Lillian had festered in her heart. But on the nights when she was shaking and trembling, trying to calm down and fall asleep, she revisited calming memories from her childhood—before Lucille’s death, when she was eight. And so many of those memories involved Spiker’s sisters. During the day, when Lillian beat her and cursed at her, all she wanted to do was hurt Lillian back. There was no bond between Lillian and the younger twins; that had snapped for good years ago. But Spiker also believed, in a tiny, subconscious corner of her mind, that there were certain things Lillian just wouldn’t do. Lillian wouldn’t, for instance, kill either of her sisters, Spiker believed. And that included abandoning them to die; Lillian wouldn’t do that.

But selling them, forcing them to go with a strange man: that was the equivalent of abandoning them to death. And that was a final act of betrayal so great and so destroying that Spiker couldn’t handle it. She’d thought it was false. She’d thought Lillian was only scaring her and her sister. But now it was clear that she hadn’t been just joking. She was serious, and she’d abandoned the girls to their death.

And that was so utterly unforgivable that it destroyed Spiker. It was so completely beyond the realm of acceptable that she suddenly couldn’t handle it. She felt betrayed. She had only trusted her sister that tiny bit, and it had all been subconscious and latent, but now that Lillian had broken even that infinitesimal piece of trust, she was filled with hatred and scorn and grief.

“She abandoned us to die!” Spiker gasped through sobs, and Sponge didn’t know who—Sandra or Lillian—her sister was talking about as she continued: “I know she hated us, but this is the same as murder! How can I ever trust her?”

“ _ Don’t _ .” Sponge’s answer was crisp and quiet. “Don’t trust her. You haven’t really for years. Don’t trust her ever again, or anyone else for that matter. The whole world’s against us.” She breathed. “Just trust me. I’ll keep you safe. And I’ll trust you—and  _ only  _ you, Spiker—to keep me safe.” Sponge pulled her sister into a sitting position. “Deal?” She stuck out her pinkie.

There were still tears streaming down her cheeks, but Spiker managed a small, weak smile; her sister had a gift with words, and her intense, comforting speeches never seemed to fail. Spiker swallowed the rough bile rising in her throat and rasped, in a low whisper, “Deal,” clasping her sister’s pinkie in her own.

“Good.” Sponge exhaled and wrapped her arms tightly around her sister, cradling Spiker’s head. For a minute the two just sat there, still; then, when Spiker’s breathing had eventually calmed, Sponge pulled her sister to her feet.

“Okay. Now let’s attack this list.” 

Spiker looked into her sister’s eyes with confusion. Something wasn’t right with Sponge’s voice. It was too upbeat, not dismayed enough, not hopeless enough; the list was frankly impossible, but Sponge’s voice didn’t reflect that. With a jolt, Spiker realized Sponge was forcing herself to be upbeat to cheer Spiker up. Well—it could hardly hurt. And so Spiker nodded resolutely and got to her feet, putting the last few minutes out of her memory.

_ Don’t despair. _

That resolve lasted only a few minutes, however; because Spiker quickly discovered that trying to complete the list would drive her to an even worse place than she’d previously been in. The first item on the list read:

  1. Wash all windows and all walls on first and second floor. (approx 90 minutes)



The house had two stories, plus a tiny, cramped attic and a larger prison-like basement. Assuming five rooms on each floor and four walls in each room, that would be at least forty good-sized walls on just the two main floors, plus windows and doors. And according to the instructions, that was only supposed to take them ninety minutes.

Sponge just stared at the first item dumbfoundedly. Then she shook her head. “Well,” she said, quietly, defeatedly. “I guess we’d better get started, then.”

***

Ninety minutes, Spiker and Sponge quickly discovered, was barely enough time to finish half of the first floor. By the time they were finally done with the bottom story, over two hours had passed. Their muscles were all on fire, overworked and pained, but they hadn’t ever been allowed to stop and breathe. When, after the third room, Sponge slumped down against the wall, needing a reprieve, Mr. O’Hara only cleared his throat and raised a fist threateningly. Sponge—whose stomach was still painfully sore from the punch she’d gotten earlier—scrambled to her feet, frightened and desperate. She took her sister’s hand and squeezed it hard, and together the two girls ignored Mr. O’Hara’s threatening, cold gaze, and strode into the fourth room to continue  their work.

It was agonizing, standing on stepladders to reach the highest corners, hauling soapy buckets and praying for them not to spill, wiping the walls down with sponges and rags and trying to be as gentle as possible so as not to chip the paint; all with Mr. O’Hara coldly, appraisingly, judgementally watching them. It was painful and slow work, and the girls didn’t even dare to speak with their—painful as it was to say it, with their  _ owner  _ standing right there 

Finally,  _ finally _ , after what seemed like days, the girls finished the last wall of the last room on the second floor. Both of them were weak, and their muscles throbbed from overwork. Sweat streamed down their faces and soaked their clothes, and they were trembling with fatigue.

Mr. O’Hara walked over to them, staring at his watch. “Two hundred and eighteen minutes,” he said, his voice steely. “Almost two and a half times what it should have taken you.” He raised his eyes appraisingly, and the girls both felt a thrill of fear run through them. But then it passed. 

“Well?” he said patronizingly, holding out his hands in bewilderment. “You still have the rest of the list.”

***

Hours ticked by on that first day, the girls slaving over the agonizing domestic tasks, not daring to speak and hardly daring to breathe under Mr. O’Hara’s cold gaze. The time passed eight o’clock, and still they weren’t done. At ten, they still had seven items on the list left. At eleven, Mr. O’Hara split them up, pushing Spiker upstairs to clean the bedrooms and shoving Sponge into the kitchen to wash the dishes from the mean he’d eaten—and cruelly refused to share with the twins. Just after midnight, when both girls were aching with exhaustion and their muscles were burning, he forced them out into the garden to weed. And at one-forty-five, they were tasked with vacuuming the living room.

Finally, after what seemed like months, Mr. O’Hara deemed them satisfactorily finished just after three o’clock. They stood before him, too exhausted to even be frightened, their eyes sagging shut and their bodies slumped and numb. The man stared looked at them heartlessly, and Spiker and Sponge would have been angry but they were just too fatigued. Spiker swayed feebly on the spot, prompting Sponge to put a gentle arm around her neck to steady her.

And at last Mr. O’Hara said they could sleep. Both girls slumped in relief, prompting the man to kick them both warningly in the shins. They fell silent and fearfully straightened their posture, not knowing exactly what he wanted them to do but not wanting to upset him.

A meaty hand on each of their collars, Mr. O’Hara led—or perhaps more accurately, dragged—the girls down to the basement, to their new bedroom. Or bed _ rooms _ , plural, as it turned out. At the foot of the stairs stood two heavy wooden doors, padlocks on them both. Sponge stared at them defeatedly; this was the final blow.

“No,” she whispered weakly, staring in despair. “Don’t separate us. Not at night.  _ Please _ .”

Mr. O’Hara only laughed. “But of course you’ll be separated!” he cackled, grinning at their stunned and hopeless faces. “Can’t have you making plans to escape, now can we?”

With that, he unlocked the respective doors and shoved the girls inside. Spiker hit the floor hard, gasping as her breath left her. Pained but determined, she scrambled to her feet, lunging towards the door; but it was swinging shut and the key was turning, and the girls were locked away alone.

Spiker cried out and sank to her knees. Sponge—her twin sister—had been her beacon of light and hope throughout everything: the last seven years under Sandra’s and Lillian’s brutal care, and then today, with its seemingly neverending torment and abuse. Hopeless, terrified, and angry, Spiker slowly began to bang her head against the rock-solid cement floor. Nights were hard for her, surrounded by darkness; and this was the first time in ages she hadn’t slept beside her sister, taking comfort in her presence. And now, when she was completely and totally  _ alone _ … 

Spiker began to cry softly. She hated it, hated feeling tears leak from her eyes, hated the overwhelming sense of not being in control and of being weak. But she couldn’t stop. And without Sponge there… 

“Spiker.  _ Spiker! _ ” Suddenly Sponge’s voice cut through the silence, and Spiker jerked around in shock. Her sharp eyes combed the darkness, but she couldn’t see anything. She scrambled to her feet, staring around. And then she saw her sister. 

Sponge, silent tears wetting her cheeks, was staring through a tiny barred window about five and a half feet off the ground. It linked the two rooms: one tiny connection, one place where the girls could see each other. Spiker staggered over to the window, gasping. Sponge reached out to touch her, stroke her face comfortingly; but the bars were so tight, so close together that she couldn’t fit a hand through. The girls just stood there, so close and yet so far; there was nothing and everything between them, and they couldn’t break through. Until finally, at about three-thirty, both twins slowly sagged from the window and crashed into a deep, dreamless sleep on the floor below. It would have been a hard and restless night, if the girls hadn’t been so completely exhausted. As such, it seemed like only a few minutes later that it was six o’clock, and Mr. O’Hara was banging roughly on their doors and—when that failed—shaking them awake; and then the brutal circle of torture and overwork started all over again.

***

Nothing was quite as bad as that very first week. They were up past midnight every single night, and by the time they were finally locked in their rooms, some tiny corner of their mind was always longing for any reprieve— even if it was back to Sandra and Lillian, even if it was awful sickness, even if it was death. But slowly, ever so slowly, and led by Spiker, the girls started to adapt. They worked quickly and uncomplainingly and alone, because that was the only way they’d ever get to bed before twelve. They hid their emotions and never even spoke in front of Mr. O’Hara, because that was the only thing that would protect them from terrible corporal punishment. They kept silent and never disagreed with their captor, because that was the only thing that would keep them alive and living in the same house. And they learned to read Mr. O’Hara’s mood and did exactly what they were told, because that was the only way they’d ever get food.

Spiker had always been more prone to tears. But she very quickly learned: that particular habit needed to stop  _ immediately. _ Mr. O’Hara would fine out and use it against her. And besides, she hated the crying. She couldn’t let them overwhelm her.

Sponge, meanwhile, had the habit of letting everything build up, and then take the fury out on a wall or a door. Sandra hadn’t ever seemed to really mind when she took a knife and started stabbing the walls of her bedroom. But Mr. O’Hara wouldn’t allow the breakdowns, and would only punish her when she let her anger and despair show. So she, too, learned to hide it, to stop.

Months passed. The girls, though they hated it, became more submissive. Bullying was taken, abuse was borne.

And then one day during midwinter, Sandra and Lillian came to visit.

Sponge saw them first, from where she was standing polishing the windows. She was just gazing absently outside, her mind blank. And then she saw the two women.

Spiker and Sponge were sixteen now, making Lillian twenty-one. It took Sponge a second to recognize the young woman who held herself strong and tall, eyes guarded (in fact, Sponge had blocked out many of the most painful memories of Lillian from her mind). But something about the woman’s face was startlingly familiar—yet different at the same time—that Sponge started, then stared. And then she placed the young woman’s identity—and sagged to her knees.

An instant later Sponge felt a hard, agonizing shot of pain along her back, the result of a long-handled broom that Mr. O’Hara had begun carrying around. She winced and bit down hard, but for the most part ignored it. She wrenched herself to her knees and stared out the window in complete shock.

Mr. O’Hara, despite himself, followed her gaze. A slow, evil smile spread across his face. “Well,” he said softly, eyes on Sponge’s angry yet fearful face; “it seems we have visitors.”

Mr. O’Hara pulled Sponge’s hair, hard, then shoved her towards the back door. “Get your sister,” he ordered. “And come  _ right back _ .” 

Sponge, not at all eager for another crack from Mr. O’Hara’s broom, scrambled away and out the door. Spiker was standing in the garden, face flushed, shoveling snow from the little garden path. She was wearing nothing more than a thin cardigan, and she was shivering, lips blue. She was even thinner than she had been when Mr. O’Hara acquired her; her frame was suffering from withheld meals. She had learned that Mr. O’Hara hated the girls to react when he drew near them, and thinking Sponge was her captor, she obediently—and more than a bit fearfully—kept her eyes downcast, working all the harder. The sight of her sister, so cold and frightful, tugged at Sponge’s heartstrings, like it always had, since she was an eight-year-old girl being hollered at by Sandra.

That memory, in all its unpleasantness, washed over Sponge, and she bit her lip. Spiker had grown out of her shoes, and Sandra had scoffed at her and  told her to wear one of Lucille’s old pairs. The horrors of her sister’s death were still fresh in the little girl’s mind (it was only about two weeks after the funeral), and she’d shuddered and refused, still terrified by the very idea of death and that it could happen to her own older sister. Sandra had stormed up to her and screamed at her, asking if she possibly believed that the family had money for a new pair of shoes—“and even if we had it, are you so deluded that you possibly think we’d use it on  _ you _ , you worthless little scumbag?” She took Lucille’s sneakers and threw them at Spiker; and then Lillian’s face had crumpled as she saw her twin sister’s old shoes, and of course Sandra had comforted  _ her _ and stroked her hair. Spiker was still whimpering in grief and fear in the corner, but Sandra hollered at the younger girl to get out of the room. When she’d hesitated slightly, Lillian had jumped up and raised a hand to slap her. That was when Spiker turned and ran.

Thinking of Sandra and Lillian suddenly reminded Sponge of what she had to do, and she shivered, thinking of what would be in store if Mr. O’Hara deemed that she’d been too slow. So she cleared her throat, and Spiker jumped, thinking she was Mr. O’Hara. Sponge winced, seeing her sister so afraid, and hastily whispered, “It’s just me, Spiker; it’s just me.”

Spiker sagged in relief and smiled weakly. “Sorry,” she murmured; “I’m just jumpy. He’s been stalking around all day.”

Sponge let out a mirthless, rueful laugh. “Well, he sent me to get you. Sandra and Lillian are here. To visit.”

Spiker froze, dropping the shovel and her mouth falling open. She stared into her sister’s eyes with a look of complete disbelief. She looked like she was going to say something, then changed her mind; then she was going to say something else, but then she changed her mind again. She just stood there, shaking her head dumbfoundedly, scared and angry and confused.

Sponge looked at her. “Come on; hurry. He told me he’d—well, he just told me not to be late.”

Spiker nodded and leapt up the porch steps. She clasped her sister’s hand tight, their fingers interlocked; and together, the two girls—sixteen now—took quick, frightened steps into the front hall.

Sponge rapped her knuckles timidly on the closed door when they arrived; Mr. O’Hara was notorious for being picky about knocking and the like. No sooner had Sponge knocked, however, than the door was ripped open. With a gasp of surprise, both girls stepped back.

Mr. O’Hara was there, and he seized both girls’ collars and threw them into the room. They stumbled forward; and almost ran smack into Sandra and Lillian, who were standing there coldly.

There was a long silence. Spiker and Sponge’s hands were balled in fists, and their eyes were blazing. It looked like only a matter of time before one of them sprang at Sandra or Lillian and brutally attacked them.

It was Lillian who broke the silence, scoffing at her sisters’ hostility. “Oh, calm down, will you?” she said scornfully, slapping Spiker’s face. Sponge, much angrier than her sister about this, raised a furious fist and was about to strike Lillian when Mr. O’Hara grabbed both girls’ hair to restrain them. They winced as he forced them to the ground, but sat submissively, as their mother and older sister sank into comfortable armchairs—the ones Spiker and Sponge were never allowed to even touch. Sandra and Lillian, clearly knowing this, smiled pretentiously. 

“Well then, girls,” Sandra said, with forced, mock diplomacy; “how has Mr. O’Hara been treating you?”

Spiker and Sponge stared at each other, hard. A honest answer, they knew, would bring nothing but pain and punishment. Besides, there was no way Sandra would try to help her daughters, even if she knew the whole truth (and, Spiker reflected, she probably actually did).

And so Spiker, staring at the carpet, whispered, “Very well, thank you.” And the she hastily remembered herself and added, “Ma’am.”

Sandra nodded at the term of forced respect. “I’m quite glad to hear that.”

Both girls scowled.  _ That  _ was an outright lie. Sandra had not sold the girls to Mr. O’Hara because he would treat them kindly. She and Lillian both knew perfectly well who the man was and what he would do. That was why they had approved the twins going with him in the first place.

Lillian raised her eyebrows at Spiker’s and Sponge’s anger with a slight, manipulative smile. “Why such angry faces?” she cooed cruelly. “Aren’t you happy to see your mother and sister again? It’s been over six months.”

All Spiker wanted to do in that moment was to shout, “You’re  _ not  _ our sister, and Sandra’s  _ not  _ our mother”; but it would have lead to so much backlash and punishment that it wasn’t even worth it. Instead she just bit her tongue and answered for the pair of sisters. “Yes, ma’am. Very happy.”

“Glad to hear it!” Sandra said, and there were so many ulterior implications hidden beneath the sweet, succulent tone of her response that it made Spiker and Sponge recoil in disgust. Sandra just gazed at the pair of them. “So,” she eventually said. “Has anything… exciting happened during the past half year?”

Sponge, suddenly seized with a bit of reckless courage, raised her eyebrows cooly and spoke with a note of insubordination and even sass to her voice. “Not so much. What about you?”

“I don’t like that attitude, girl,” Mr. O’Hara growled from behind her, giving her left shoulder a warning slap. “Show your mother some respect.”

Sponge winced at the force of the blow. She opened her mouth to retort, but Spiker put a hand on her shoulder as a gentle reminder to think about what potential consequences each of her actions could have. And even though all Sponge wanted to do was make a face and turn her head away, But neither Sandra nor Lillian would allow that to go unpunished, and Mr. O’Hara certainly wouldn’t either. So instead, with a peripheral glance at her sister, she deflated, all of the fight draining from her. Fighting to keep her emotions neutral, neither sassy and outspoken nor some hybrid mix of terrified, angry, and anguished, Sponge bowed her head with a quiet, “Yes, sir”; and when she repeated her question to her mother, it was in a weak, submissive voice. Sandra grinned maliciously at the tone.

“Finally learned some respect for authority, have you?” she cackled. Sandra smiled approvingly at Mr. O’Hara. “Whatever you’ve done to her, Robert, I commend you for it.”

Sponge sat back on her heels, her heart pounding furiously. It pumped burning anger through her veins, made her want to leap up and pummel Sandra with her fists. But Spiker was there, giving her knee a quick squeeze, reminding her to think and not let the anger control her. Sponge nodded. She could do that, if she really tried.

_ Think. Focus. Stay in control. _

“They have proved relatively easy to train,” Mr. O’Hara said concedingly, eyeing the girls in a way he’d never done before. Both girls’ eyes bored holes into the carpet, their gazes blazing with fury. Neither of them  _ wanted  _ to be—as Mr. O’Hara put it—“easy to train”; but they clearly were, against all of their best intentions. The thing was, when they obeyed his cruel orders without protest, it was only to get food or water or sleep; or, just as often, time with each other. They didn’t like listening to him without a fight, but if they didn’t, they’d be punished so severely that disobeying wasn’t even a plausible option.

So maybe, just maybe, Spiker thought, her body sinking with an overwhelming feeling of dread, maybe he was right. Maybe all of that  _ did  _ make them “easy to train”.

But at the same time, it also did keep them alive. So there was that.

Spiker stared at the carpet, biting her lip hard and trying not to lose control. It seemed like whatever she did, it led back to Mr. O’Hara’s dangerous clutches somehow. There seemed to be no escape…

_ “Girl!”  _ Suddenly there was the sharp pain of someone digging their knee into her back. Spiker, who had been kneeling, fell forward with a cry, somehow managing to catch herself with her hands so she didn’t fall flat on her chest. Next to her, Sponge pursed her lips, feeling her body tense up; but she didn’t move. Not yet. Wait and see… 

“We were just talking about you,” Sandra said coldly as the sixteen-year-old slowly raised herself back to her knees. Spiker, with all the effort she could muster, kept her eyes neutral and forced her body to relax.

“I’m sorry I wasn’t listening, ma’am.” The words were trite and quiet, and Spiker hated saying them with all her heart; but Spiker wanted to give Lillian, Sandra, and Mr. O’Hara absolutely no excuse to hurt her. 

Unfortunately, they could create excuses out of thin air.

Sandra jerked her head at her daughter, scoffing. “Like I said— _ that’s  _ the behavior you’ve got to curb. The inattention, the unfocus… it’s more damaging than the willful disobedience.”

Mr. O’Hara took a hold of Spiker’s single braid and jerked it, so her head  snapped around and she stared straight into his eyes. He looked appraisingly at her; and though his words themselves were not necessarily cruel, his tone and the context made what he said horrible.

“Funny.  She’s not usually like this,” the girl’s guardian said, keeping a firm hold on her braid and taking pleasure in the look of pain on her face. “That’s just something we’ll have to  _ work on _ , now isn’t it?”

The foreboding emphasis on “work on”; the sharp, knife-like edge behind “not usually like this”; the cold iciness behind the entire sentence: everything about it made Spiker shiver. She closed her eyes, trying to collect herself, and pressed her lips together. When she opened her eyes again, though, they were emotionless and silent; and try as they might, nobody could find anything in her gaze to fault her for.

“Yes, well, we had that problem with them too,” Sandra replied casually, leaning back in her chair. “I’m sure you’ve already tried it, but withholding meals always seemed to work particularly well for us.”

Mr. O’Hara raised an interested eyebrow, nodding. “That’s not generally my first method of discipline, but you’re right: with these two, it does seem to get results.” He turned to the girls and smiled cruelly. “I’ll be sure to use it more often.”

Spiker winced and ducked her head, while Sponge’s eyes blazed with fury at the injustice; but neither of them moved a muscle or spoke a word. Instead they just stayed there, frozen, kneeling, praying for Sandra and Lillian to leave soon and for them to be allowed to go to bed (if they were lucky) or finish their chores as quickly as they could and then go to bed (if they were unlucky, because by the time they were done it was sure to be midnight). But both of them had a dreadful, sneaking suspicion that either way, neither of them was getting dinner. 

The very thought of going to bed without food yet again made Spiker’s stomach growl loudly, and in the lull of conversation between Sandra and Mr. O’Hara, everyone heard it; and of course everyone reacted. Spiker ducked her head shyly, biting down hard on her lip; Sponge put a gentle hand on her knee and held it there, which was as comforting as anything in that moment could have been; Lillian glanced at her, mouth twisting, then looked away; Mr. O’Hara smirked at her, smiling broadly for the first time that day with pleasure; and Sandra outright laughed cruelly, looking exceedingly pleased. 

“Good to see them… react, isn’t it?” she laughed. “That’s how you know you’re reaching them.” As she spoke, Sandra drew a flask from her bag and unscrewed it, tipping a generous amount into her mouth. The sour, stale smell of alcohol wafted across the room, making both of the woman’s daughters wrinkle their noses in disgust. Mr. O’Hara nodded approvingly at the stench, a slight, almost wistful smile stealing across his face. He sighed.

“Ah well… there remains work to be done, but these girls have come along nicely. Hard workers, the both of them; not perfect, but acceptable.”

“Only hard workers if they have to be,” Sandra countered; then, she reflected, “Although I suppose that’s better than nothing.”

Mr. O’Hara laughed—a real laugh. “Indeed!” he chucked. “Well, Mrs. Harrisburg; thank you for your lovely visit. I’m sure your daughters enjoyed it very much. Now”—and here his voice grew steely—“they  _ do  _ need to get back to work; please excuse them.” He waited expectantly while the girls got up, heads bowed, and left the room in silence. Then he turned to Sandra and Lillian. “Care to stay for dinner?” he asked. “I’m sure we could put together something wonderful.”

Sandra smiled. “Thank you. For the offer, but I’m afraid we must get home. Our new serving-girl is preparing a delicious meal, and afterwards Lillian and I are going to a concert.”

Mr. O’Hara looked politely interested. “Ah, a concert! Anything special?”

“Oh, a young man Lillian admires,” Sandra replied with a grin. “A violinist; we first saw him play a few months ago. Perhaps you’ve heard of him; his name is Anthony… Anthony Trotter?”

Mr. O’Hara shook his head. “Can’t say that I have.” He stood up. “Well, pardon me; I have to make sure the little brats don’t get into too much trouble.” Then he smiled wickedly. “And come back any time you want to see your daughters again. Although you may want to do it soon, if you want to do it at all; at the rate they’re going, it’s very unlikely that they’ll survive the winter.”


	5. Out of the Darkness

Despite Mr. O’Hara’s grim prophecy, when the February snow melted, both girls were still alive.  But they were clearly suffering, both physically and mentally; their faces alone were proof of that. Not only were both girls’ faces covered in bruises and scars, their eyes were perpetually lifeless, and their mouths seemed to have forgotten how to smile. Far from punishing them from speaking out of turn, it was now much more common for Mr. O’Hara to punish them for not answering him with words when he explicitly asked them a question or gave them an order.

The girls’ submission peaked during the spring of 1947. And slowly, as spring bled into summer, they became more defiant. At first it was only mentally: hopelessness faded, to be replaced by annoyance, building anger, and eventually fury. Perhaps it was because they were just growing older; perhaps they’d reached the limits of what they could take. Either way, by August, both of them were refusing to take Mr. O’Hara’s abuse lying down; and though they didn’t often outright protest, the looks in their eyes and in their faces told Mr. O’Hara that what he was doing was going to drive them over the edge. He could barely find reasons to punish them—outwardly they weren’t doing anything wrong: they always obeyed orders quickly and did their work well—but he grew more and more frustrated with them as time passed.

Sandra and Lillian came back to visit once more; Sandra came alone another time after that. The one time that Lillian did again step foot in Mr. O’Hara’s house, Spiker and Sponge kept their prickly distance. Lillian’s eyes had grown less cloudy and her entire face had grown less furious, but neither of her sisters was willing to trust her again.

Sandra, on the other hand, went out of her way to find her daughters both times she was there and took pleasure in seeing them punished in front of her. During one awful visit, Sandra had stayed for three days and two nights, sleeping in the spare bedroom upstairs and acting just like she had when Spiker and Sponge had been legally under her care. But Sandra ultimately left after a few days, and Spiker and Sponge were glad to see her go.

The twins were growing in their ability to manage their situation, but they were still in an awful place. During the past seven days, for instance, they had received eight meals—which on three days had included two meals a day, leaving two other days with no food at all. They were crazily overworked, even more so than they had already been, and their bodies ached just from the physical exertion. Not to mention the fact that Mr. O’Hara had somehow gotten even more liberal with his use of corporal punishment, and that left the girls with fresh bruises and cuts almost every night.

One terrible day in October made it suddenly too much. Spiker was cleaning Mr. O’Hara’s bedroom while simultaneously washing his clothes (in a washing machine he had only recently acquired), while Sponge had been precariously balanced on the roof of the house, replacing broken tiles and sealing the entire thing so it would be watertight. A miserable rain was trickling down from the sky, dampening everyone’s spirits; Spiker had been beating rugs outside when it had started and had gotten a furious tongue-lashing and had been promised later punishment for allowing them to get the slightest bit wet. The roofing asphalt that Sponge had been using to seal the roof tiles got soaking wet and—since it hadn’t dried properly yet—runny, so it began to slip from where it should have been and drip down the roof, completely ruining all of Sponge’s hard work. She winced and clambered down the rickety stepladder as the wind began to pick up, not wanting to get tossed about in the gales.

Unfortunately, Mr. O’Hara was waiting there, and slapped her cheek hard, screaming at her to get back on the roof and finish the task. Of course Sponge knew there would be no point in protesting, but she was still terrified: the wind was harsh and cold, and she knew there was a very good chance of getting blown off of the top of the roof. She hesitated just a second; and Mr. O’Hara raised his heavy broom and smacked her on her right shoulder, making Sponge close her eyes and wince. Her eyes filled with fear, she slowly walked back over to the ladder and scaled it towards the roof.

Spiker had come out onto the porch to see what was happening, and gasped at the sight of her sister climbing up into the ferocious winds. She cried out, but Mr. O’Hara just screamed at her to be silent and to go inside and get back to work, and Sponge gave her a look that said, quite clearly,  _ don’t protest.  _ She staggered up the last few rungs, her clothes and hair flapping furiously in the wind, and went to finish her task.

It was raining buckets now, and Sponge was soaked to the bone and freezing. Lips blue, teeth chattering, she sought out the last dozen or so tiles that needed to be replaced and crawled over to them. Luckily, they were all in generally the same place (Sponge had worked on the roof in sections), so she had less clambering around to do. Gritting her teeth, she wrenched the bucket of asphalt roof cement over towards her and dipped a brush into it, fixing the tile into place and coating it with the supposedly waterproof substance.

It took Sponge about fifteen minutes to finish the roof, and the storm, while it hadn’t intensified, hadn’t died down either. Shuddering violently now with the cold, Sponge stumbled back towards the ladder and clambered down.

About four rungs from the bottom, a particularly merciless gale seized the ladder and flung it to the ground. Sponge was thrown against the cement at the bottom, a bloody cut appearing on her forearm instantly. She gasped but forced herself to her feet, then grabbed the ladder, leaned it back against the house where it was always kept and secured it with rope, and dived onto the porch and forced herself through the door into the clean, dry house.

Sponge sat on her hands and knees in the entry hall, water streaming from her body. She was coughing and shivering, her entire face blue. Spiker came dashing in from the kitchen, where she’d been put to work cooking, and dropped to her knees beside her sister. Spiker pressed a piping hot dish towel into her sister’s hands; Spiker pressed it against her face, giving a sigh as the hot water began to warm her face. Seeing her shuddering body, Spiker hastily ripped off her own thin but wonderfully dry cardigan and threw it over her sister’s shoulders. Sponge collapsed to the ground, lying face-down, panting as water still streamed from her clothes.

Mr. O’Hara, his gray hair perfectly dry, walked into the room and stood above the girls. He kicked Spiker’s cheek so hard that she was flung backwards, and she sat, terrified, with her back against the wall. “Get back to the kitchen,” he growled menacingly towards her, and with a quick, quiet, “Yes, sir,” Spiker did as she was told. Then Mr. O’Hara turned to Sponge.

“ _ You _ —get down to your bedroom and dry off, girl,” he snapped. “You have five minutes to be back up here cleaned off, wearing dry clothes, and with your hair braided.” He kicked her in the stomach for good measure; just to reinforce his point. Then, when she hesitated, he hollered, “Go!” And Sponge scrambled off towards her basement bedroom, paying no mind to the heavy steps that descended after her.

As soon as she was inside, she slammed the door and sat with her back against the wall, breathing heavily. Her nerves were shot; terror still coursed through her from being alone on top of the precarious, unstable roof. She was soaking wet and freezing cold. Her hair clung to her face and dripped down her back, making her even chillier. Her lips were blue, and when she put a hand to her face, she could have sworn it was cold enough to have ice.

Suddenly Sponge heard the harsh, all-too-familiar clicking of a key turning in a lock. She jumped up and flung a hand against the door, but it was too late; the deadbolt had turned and she was locked in her room until morning. Sponge screamed in rage and banged her fists hard against the door, yelling furious obscenities; but nobody came to unlock her door.

Wincing, Sponge sank to the ground. A few stray tears beaded in her eyes. Furiously, she bit them back, eyes screwed tightly shut. After she was certain she wasn’t going to cry, Sponge relaxed and sat back, cradling her empty stomach with a slight moan. She felt her eyes slowly start to slip shut. Summoning all her energy, drawing on her fury and anger to give her strength, Sponge wrenched herself to her feet and stumbled over to the tiny, hard bed and tucked her wet and shivering self under the meager cotton blanket.

Sponge knew she drifted off; she just didn’t know for how long. It seemed like just a few seconds later that Spiker was hissing her name into the silence, and Sponge woke up with a jolt. She raised her fists immediately, an instinctive response; but as soon as she saw her sister’s pale face gleaming through the too-tight bars on the tiny window between the girls’ rooms, she relaxed, scrambling to her feet and over towards the window.

“I got you dinner” were the first words to leave Spiker’s lips; and Sponge’s eyes lit up with eagerness. She smiled, relieved and grateful; her stomach still felt horribly hollow.

Spiker held up an apple. Of course it was far too wide to fit through the window’s bars, but she had cut it into long, thin slices, which she passed vertically through the window. Sponge wolfed them down, not realizing how hungry she was until she took the first bite. Spiker smiled weakly as she saw her sister’s stomach full, if only very slightly.

But it was clear Spiker had something else to say. She was biting her lip and looking away, something she only did when incredibly nervous; and Sponge was surprised to see the look on her face as she was talking to her own sister. But Sponge remained silent, waiting for her sister to speak, knowing prodding wouldn’t help. And finally Spiker did talk.

“We need to get out of here,” she whispered. “We’ve got to escape. We  _ have  _ to.”

Sponge looked into her eyes. And then she nodded her silent consent.

That was the first step in formulating their escape plan.

***

It took three weeks of staying up nearly the entire night, furiously practicing jiggling bent paper clips in the keyholes of their door, until Spiker and Sponge were certain that they could get past the first lock on their door: a key-and-keyhole apparatus like one found on every front door. The second lock would be significantly harder—Mr. O’Hara deadbolted their doors from the outside, and neither girl had any idea how to circumnavigate that problem. They just knew they had to. They had to escape.

It was Spiker who had the mental breakthrough. The deadbolt, she realized, was iron, and iron is magnetic. A very strong magnet would do the trick, Spiker knew; if they could get their hands on, for instance, a horseshoe magnet, they could manipulate the deadbolt through the wood from the back side of the door.

The next step was to find a strong enough magnet. This was accomplished when Sponge was cleaning the heavy knife rack in the kitchen and discovered that it was held to the wall by six powerful magnets in three rows of two. Eyes glinting, the sixteen-year-old clambered up to the counter and took the entire rack down under the pretense of cleaning it. Hastily, keeping an eye out behind her, she wrenched one of the magnets in the middle row off of the rack, trusting that the others would be strong enough to hold the apparatus to the wall. She was completely correct (although the rack did sway a little if someone hit it hard). Stuffing the strong magnet in her pocket, Sponge went back to her chores, her heart pounding.

That night, alone in their respective rooms, the girls made their final preparations, peering through the bars. Both of their faces were a stark, fearful white, shining with nervous perspiration. If they were caught in an escape attempt, the punishment would be horrible.

But Spiker and Sponge couldn’t stay in Mr. O’Hara’s hellhole of a house another day. They were constantly bruised, bone-weary, and hungry, and they couldn’t take another day. Risks had to be taken. They needed to get out, now.

So, just after midnight, when the girls heard Mr. O’Hara’s footsteps retreating into his room, Spiker took the magnet from her pocket and the paper clip from her dress. Biting her lip, she did exactly what she’d practiced a thousand times: jiggled the paper clip in the lock. She was terrified it wouldn’t work. But Spiker had practiced cracking a lock for a reason, and after less than a minute, it popped open. Spiker let out a breath, hardly daring to believe it. 

Spiker crossed back to the window and passed the paper clip through the bars to her sister, who took it with shaking hands. Then, tiptoeing out of fear even though there was no way Mr. O’Hara could hear her, Spiker crept back to the door and, with bated breath, raised the magnet to the wood opposite the metal deadbolt.

Spiker’s heart was in her throat by that point, and she could barely breathe out of terror. But she swallowed hard, summoned up all the agonizing memories as a painful reminder of why she  _ needed  _ to escape, and—with the practiced, ulterior precision of a thief cracking a safe—she pressed the magnet to the wood and slid.

It didn’t work; not the first time, at least. Spiker cursed under her breath. Sponge nervously shook her head. “Calm down,” she whispered; “you can do it. Don’t stress.”

Of course that was much easier said than done, but it did help Spiker somewhat. She closed her eyes for a few quick moments and took three deep breaths; then, when she opened her eyes again, she was calmer and more determined than ever. Again Spiker raised the metal to the wood, pressed, and slid.

It didn’t catch, yet again. It didn’t work the third time Spiker tried, either; or the fourth; or the fifth.

But on the girl’s sixth attempt, there was a faint, almost silent click, like metal catching. Spiker sucked in a breath but didn’t move; she just held the magnet there for a good five seconds. And then she did begin to slide it, incredibly slowly and gently, across the wood.

On the other side of the heavy oak door, the deadbolt ever so slowly began to slide.

It was working, Spiker realized, and she began to get excited (though cautiously so). Not upping the pace of her movement, Spiker kept sliding the magnet, her confidence growing exponentially every second. And then, finally, after about fifteen seconds, something clicked on the far side of the door.

Spiker pushed on the door.

It swung open.

Spiker dropped to her knees, covering her mouth with her palms. She threw her head back in relief and joy, squeezing her eyes shut as tears began wet them. She was still breathing hard, but she was braver, stronger now; she was still filled with fear, but not terror. Now she knew she could handle herself.

After only a few seconds, Spiker scrambled back to her feet and stepped out of her room. In just a few quick paces she had crossed to her sister’s locked door and thrown the deadbolt open. Sponge, for her part, had picked the lock of her bedroom and shoved the door open as soon as Spiker threw the deadbolt. Sponge stumbled from her room; the sisters quickly embraced; and then they shared a look of grim determination and silently crept towards the stairs out of the basement.

Spiker had discreetly left a side window open that day, and, hearts in their throats, the girls stole towards it. Silently Spiker swung through it and dropped to the ground; in just a few seconds, her sister followed after her. Making absolutely no sound, the girls began to creep across the lawn towards the edge of their captor’s property. And nothing happened: the girls remained undiscovered.

But the problems came when Spiker tripped over a bucket that had been left lying on the ground, and she fell to the ground with a crash that echoed all around the silent yard.

The corporal punishment that Mr. O’Hara used on them had taken a toll on both girls’ bodies, so Spiker wasn’t able to stand comfortably for a few moments. By the time she was back on her feet and inching forward, Mr. O’Hara had woken up and was stumbling towards the door. There was no doubt in his mind that his two slave girls were trying to escape in the night. Were they going to get it!

Panting with fear, Sponge put a comforting hand on her sister’s slim shoulder, trying to urge her to up her pace. Both girls were incredibly nervous, but to them, at this point, their entire future relied on them escaping Mr. O’Hara, and they weren’t about to throw away that shot. It still wasn’t going to be easy, though. The night was pitch black, and the girls were weak and tired.

Then Sponge heard Mr. O’Hara crashing towards them, and fury flooded up in her. Suddenly, now that she was outside the house and just out of his clutches, every bit of the hatred she’d ever felt for that horrid man was back, making her entire body feel like it was blazing with anger. And she turned and sprinted faster than she’d ever run in her life, her sister by her side; they were aided by adrenaline and hate and fear. The blood pounded in Spiker’s ears as she felt her legs flying beneath her. The sound of her sister’s panting made her even more determined to escape.

Just then, the two girls came to the fence at the edge of Mr. O’Hara’s pasture. It was tall, but very easy to climb; made of wood, with plenty of hand- and foot-holds. The two girls jumped up onto it and began to scale the ladder-like surface; but then suddenly a meaty hand grabbed each of their ankles, and it pulled them from the fence, slamming them hard into the ground.

All at once both girls were up again, screaming obscenities at their captor looming above them. Sponge’s fury suddenly burst from her, and a well-packed punch from her arm landed squarely on Mr. O’Hara’s cheek. With a cry, he crumpled to his knees. But he still had his formidable broom, and he started lashing wildly out with it, trying to hit Spiker and Sponge in the near blackness of the night. Brow furrowed, fury consuming her, Sponge grabbed the end of the broom when Mr. O’Hara aimed it at her and pulled it from his grasp with one strong jerk. He gave a small gasp of shock; but then it turned into a wail of pain as Sponge set on him, beating him bloody with the broom he’d wielded against the girls. Again and again she cracked the wooden handle down onto his chest, his face, his neck. And Spiker knelt by his face, raking his cheeks with her sharp fingernails and causing innumerable beads of blood to well on his flesh and stream down his face; she punched him and kicked him and even bit him. And the man was lashing out with his hands, trying to catch one of the girls; but they were too quick, and too determined, and too furious. The girls’ horrible revenge went on for nearly twenty minutes; by the end of it, Mr. O’Hara had stopped making any noise at all. He was only twitching slightly. Then Sponge slammed the broom handle into Mr. O’Hara’s head, and the two girls finally scaled the fence and dropped down the other side, out of the hands of the man who had kept them captive for years. Slowly they began to walk away, heads lifted, eyes gazing at the slowly-rising morning sun; but now even more angry: now they were furious again at Sandra, but especially at Lillian, who had turned on them, betrayed them in a way no sister ever should, hurt them more than anyone else. And they vowed revenge.

***

Lillian Harrisburg, now twenty-two, was sitting at the kitchen table while the family’s new serving-girl made a pot of oatmeal. Lillian was reading aloud from a newspaper article about a man who had been found dead, covered in blood and obviously the victim of a terrible beating, two nights ago. Her mother sat, sipping a cup of coffee, across the table from her. 

Then a man walked into the room. Twenty-three-year-old Anthony Trotte was  now Lillian’s fiancee; the two were to be married in three weeks, on April 27, in St. Gerald’s Chapel down the hill. 

Anthony greeted Lillian, gave her a warm kiss, and sat next to her on the bench. They made small talk for a minute; Lillian referenced the newspaper article with no real interest; and then the two went out for a walk in the crisp early-morning light.

Their day was bright, filled with laughter and sunshine. Their younger sisters weren’t faring as well.


	6. A Breath of Fresh Air

Yes, they’d escaped Mr. O’Hara, and yes, their lives were ever so much better than thirty-six hours ago, but Spiker and Sponge were still two small, malnourished seventeen-year-old girls with dirty cheeks and torn clothes, searching for a bite to eat, a drop to drink, and a roof to have over their heads.

The first order of the day was originally to find water, but after a rainstorm started, that became finding someplace dry. The two young women were still hungry, but they were used to going days—sometimes even weeks—without a decent meal. So they were okay for the time being.

Fortune struck when they found an old, abandoned cabin on the top of a hill. The rain was pouring down in buckets now, a torrential thunderstorm that drenched their clothes and made their long brown hair cling to their faces, heads, and necks. Both were shivering, their teeth chattering, unable to speak through lips blue with the cold. They scrambled to the cabin’s door, wrenched it open, and tumbled through, their soaking wet clothes clinging to their bodies. Spiker and Sponge lay on the floor for a good ten minutes, shivering, hugging themselves to warm up, as the water streamed from their bodies. Finally their teeth stopped chattering, and they were able to stand up.

There was still silence for a few minutes. Then Spiker dared to open her mouth and ask the question that was on both of their minds.

“What now?”

Sponge just looked at her sister with wide eyes. “I don’t know. But I can’t even think about it right now. I need to sleep.”

Spiker nodded, holding her gaze for a long time, and the two curled up on the ground side by side to sleep.

But strangely, both girls found that they just couldn’t drift off into dreamland. Their hearts were both still hammering. Their fury had dulled, but it still pulsed in them; it was now more like a three-day-old wound that still throbbed painfully and less like the feeling of a knife sticking out of your arm as your blood gushed onto the street. But it still bothered them.

Strangely—and possibly most disturbingly—neither girl was at all bothered by their horrible assault on Mr. O’Hara. It didn’t haunt their dreams or plague their nightmares. To the contrary, whenever they thought about his body lying bloodied and battered, limbs twisting out at impossible angles, a feeling of satisfaction snuck into them. Mr. O’Hara’s body would have been a sickening sight to anybody else, but not only were Spiker and Sponge not disturbed by it, they relished it. They were happy about it.

The girls lay side-by-side for hours until they finally drifted off to sleep. And in the morning, they woke with the sun, ready to face a new day and decide what to do.

Spiker and Sponge were not rash people. They knew they would need money, food, and shelter, and a steady source of income. So that day they trekked down the hill to the bustling little marketplace to see about finding work. Their ratty clothes, sunken cheeks, and underfed bodies made them the subject of many stares and whispers, but even worse, of taunts and jeers by some children. A group of ten- and eleven-year-olds ran behind them, throwing rocks and yelling insults. Spiker and Sponge continually ignored them, eyes fixed straight ahead; but they bit their lips harder with every insult thrown.

Finally it went too far. A little girl darted up in front of Spiker and Sponge and stuck out her tongue, her blond hair flying wildly. She sneered, “Didn’t you have any mother to comb your hair this morning?” Then something seemed to come to her, and she continued: “Oh, wait—I’ll bet your mother cast you out of her home ’cause you’re so ugly and stupid! I’ll bet she—”

This was just too much for Spiker and Sponge to bear. It hit too close to the truth to be funny, and hatred for Sandra still coursed in their veins. Stepping forward, Spiker slapped the girl across the face. With a cry, she fell. Sponge leapt on her, pinning her to the hard cobblestone ground; Spiker held the girl’s ankles.

Sponge gave a warning look back at the girl’s friends, a threat in her gaze:  _ If you come a step closer, you’re going to get it. _ Then she turned to the little girl. “You want to see what our mother did to us?” she growled. “I’m afraid you won’t like it very much.” She punched the girl’s cheek hard.

Then Spiker leaned over the girl. “What’s your name?” she demanded.

The girl’s voice quavered as she answered, “Emily,” in a tiny voice.“Well, Emily,” Spiker said, “our mother abused us like you wouldn’t even believe. Every single day we were beaten, and it was much worse than what we’re doing to you now. She ordered us about like slaves; she loved our older sisters so much more than us; she blamed us for our sister Lucille’s death. Be glad you’re well-fed and warm, because we weren’t; and if we had our way with it, you wouldn’t be either.” Then, conscious of passerbys’ eyes on her, she stood up and let Emily rise.

And the two girls continued on towards the marketplace.

***

Anthony Trotter and his new wife, Lillian Trotter, left the chapel with hearts lighter than air. They were laughing and smiling and giggling like teenagers, even though they were both well over twenty. Lillian wore a silky white wedding dress with a veil that cascaded nearly to her waist, shrouding her hair, which had darkened to a sandy caramel color over the years. On Lillian’s finger was a glittering diamond ring, which looked quite expensive, but which Anthony assured her all came from his personal finances. He was… well, not destitute, nor the least financially unstable. He had plenty of money for today, tomorrow, and years to come. 

Lillian literally skipped down the hill, swinging Anthony’s hand. They were both laughing, giddy, smiling and playing. Anthony reached up and stroked Lillian’s hair in the gentle, comforting way he always did, and Lillian was filled with happiness and content.

It was a warm, pleasant feeling. The couple would be blessed to feel this way for many years—though, possibly, in their eyes and their family’s eyes, not quite long enough.

***

Spiker and Sponge shared their eighteenth birthday cake seated in the dingy kitchen of the cabin they’d found just over a year ago now. The girls were still not wealthy, or privileged, but during the past year their cheeks had become less sunken, their eyes less dark, their stomachs less hollow. They ate at least two full meals a day now, sometimes even three; and they earned enough money from various jobs, both formal and informal, to save enough money for a special treat now and then—like today’s birthday cake, for instance. Water was more expensive than either girl had anticipated, but through a combination of an ingenious water-barrel system Spiker had rigged up and the generosity of several marketplace vendors, they always had just enough water to get by. True, they didn’t have excessive water (they were limited to one shower a week each, and half a glass of water per meal), but they got by.

_ Barely. _

The truth was, despite how much better their life was than a few years ago, both Spiker and Sponge were quite miserable. They worked odd jobs at odd hours; several of their employers had questionable motives. They were teased and berated for their appearances—neither looked deceptively affluent—and shunned, hated even, by many because of their treatment of little Emily.

What was now known as “the Emily controversy” just didn’t seem to go away. On side A of the debate were the people who felt sorry for the little girl, but maintained that she’d been bullying and provoking Spiker and Sponge; and if she didn’t want to get hurt, she shouldn’t make it a habit to go around hurting other people. On side B were the people who conceded that yes, maybe Emily had been wrong, but insisted that two seventeen-year-olds should never have attacked her the way they did, regardless of how abused they’d been themselves.

Spiker and Sponge were alone on a secret side C. They’d relished hurting Emily and wanted to do more of it. But they couldn’t let anybody else in on this.

As Sponge swallowed one last bite of the rich chocolatey cake and the sugary yellow vanilla frosting, she licked her lips and looked up at her sister. “So,” she sighed. “What’s up tomorrow?”

Spiker sighed too and pulled a tattered piece of paper towards her. “Mr. Conners wants his pigsty shoveled out, cleaned, and swept before 10:30 tomorrow morning; he’ll pay a quarter-pound. Jen Wilson needs help in the kitchen with a gourmet meal; she’ll give us a half-pound if we work from ten to four. Farmer Robertson needs the entire west field plowed; that’s worth a pound for every four hours of work. Suzanne Blancy needs someone to watch her six kids from five to seven, for a quarter-pound. And Marcus Spielberg needs someone to help with housework after he gets home from his night shift, which ends at eight; so we can work from eight to ten, and he’ll give us a half-pound for it.”

Sponge sighed. “Okay. So we do Conners’ pigsty at, what, eight-thirty tomorrow, then you go help Ms. Wilson and I work in Robertson’s fields until four. We team up and do Suzanne’s kids, then one of us arranges dinner and the other does Spielberg. Does that work?”

Spiker nodded wearily. “I got Spielberg. You’re the better chef anyways.”

Sponge offered a weak smile. “Thanks,” she murmured. “First compliment I’ve heard in forever.”

***

The next day was horribly grueling, though hardly more so than any other day. The girls were up just before dawn to do the housework they needed to sustain themselves. Sponge was fixing a leak in the twins’ raincatcher system, while Spiker was in charge of preparing breakfast that morning. After gulping down a quick meal, and washing it down with a swallow of precious water each, the twins went out to the patch of soil they’d tilled over the course of the last few months. Recently they had saved up enough money to purchase seeds to grow potatoes and beans; they’d planted about half, and were anxiously watering the garden every day, desperate for the seeds to sprout. The girls were hoping to save up enough money to buy a few chickens, too, so they could have eggs—and possibly even meat, if they could get the chickens to breed. They were dying to become self-sufficient, so they wouldn’t have to spend their agonizingly long days slaving for other people and barely scraping up enough cash to get by.

After the garden maintenance, it was almost eight o’clock; the girls had to get moving if they were going to get to Mr. Conners’ farm on time. Lacing up heavy working boots, tying their stray hair back with lengths of string they’d managed to scrape from the butcher, the girls splashed a bit of water on their faces and then started down the hill.

The day was a scorcher, even from the moment the sun first peaked its fiery mane over the horizon. Sponge’s work in Farmer Robertson’s field was awful; the sun seemed to be frying her skin, and her entire body was soaked with sweat. While Farmer Robertson tolerated her because she worked hard and well, he certainly didn’t like her, and couldn’t be bothered to give her any water or offer her the chance to take a break; in fact, he made it well known that every minute she rested would result in a half-pound being taken off her pay. By four o’clock, Sponge felt feverish and weak; she could barely stand, and her hand was shaking as Farmer Robertson dropped her pay into it. As soon as she got off of his property, she collapsed to her knees under the shade of a great willow tree, trembling, her head throbbing. She pursed her lips, wracking her brains to see what she could remember about heat stroke. It took her nearly twenty minutes of lying under the willow, gulping water from the brook that ran under the tree, for her to feel better.

And once Sponge had regained enough strength to stand comfortably on her own, she had to dart out and find Spiker by Suzanne Blancy’s house to look after six children, ranging in age from eight months to eight years, for two hours. The Blancy children were a handful; the two oldest, Natasha and Chloe, were only a year and a half apart and loved teasing Spiker and Sponge, jumping out behind them, screaming, dropping toy spiders in Sponge’s view when they knew she hated them. The girls’ younger siblings included a pair of boys, eleven months apart, named Garrett and David, aged five and six, who didn’t fight Spiker and Sponge but were simply very difficult children. They couldn’t focus on anything for more than a few minutes; they were picky eaters; they were loud. Rounding out the children were three-year-old Jeremy and eight-month-old Lizzie. Spiker and Sponge had their hands full the entire time, cooking dinner for the children, putting Lizzie to sleep, reading bedtime stories to Jeremy, David, and Garrett, and fighting to get Natasha and Chloe to stop their infernal game of hide-and-seek in which Spiker and Sponge had become the completely unwilling seekers.

The “game” was still going on when Suzanne came home, and of course Natasha and Chloe played the “we didn’t do anything” card. Their mother ate it right up, placing the blame on Spiker’s and Sponge’s shoulders. She still paid the girls the promised amount, but she told them not to expect any more child-sitting jobs from  _ her _ , nor from anybody else, because she would be sure to tell everybody in the entire town how they had riled her well-mannered children up and made them shout, and completely ignored the younger children; they’d probably sent them straight to bed without supper! Then she slammed the door in the twins’ faces.

Spiker and Sponge walked home, heads down, in silence. A miserable rain had begun to drizzle down from the sky, dampening the girls’ bodies and their spirits. Spiker walked with her eyes closed, trying not to drown in despair and anguish. In her fist, growing frigid and numb from the rain, she clutched the money she and Sponge had made that day: two full pounds. That would be enough for a whole week’s worth of water, or two days’ worth of eggs, or another packet of seeds for the garden. Or it could be used for clothes; both girls desperately needed new boots. And the winter was setting on; they needed heavier sweaters, too.

Spiker suddenly took a deep, shuddering breath, her entire chest rattling. Her body was burning despite the cold. She wasn’t sick—she  _ couldn’t  _ be, oh please, now now!—but she suddenly felt the weight of the world on her shoulders and it was incredibly heavy. She squeezed her eyes even tighter shut, trying to block out the shameful tears that burned in her eyes. She heard her sister calling her name, felt Sponge’s strong arm around her shoulder; then she leaned into her sister’s body and collapsed in the mud.


	7. What Family Means

When Spiker woke up, she was wrapped in a blanket—a luxury—and she was lying next to a crackling fire. Her eyelids shot open at that sight and she was sitting up in an instant. Firewood was incredibly expensive; why had it been used? Was she really that sick?

Stretching forwards, Spiker saw a note resting on the floor a ways away.

_ Spiker— _

_ If you’re reading this, then you’re awake, which is a good thing, at least. I’ve gone off to work at Spielberg’s; we need that money. When I get back I can make soup. Don’t try to do anything . You’re seriously sick. Sleep and try to relax, if you can. Don’t let the “but I need to”’s creep into your head. _

_ Love, _

_ Your sister _

Spiker sagged backwards, too weak to even sit up properly. She had a pounding headache. Wincing, Spiker thought back to when Sponge had arrived at the Blancys’s. She’d said something about having a severe headache, too, but she knew it was heat-related. Apparently Farmer Robertson had worked her to exhaustion, not even offering her water after four long hours slaving away in the sun. Oh,  why  had Sponge gone out to Mr. Spielberg’s? They could do without the money. She shouldn’t have pushed herself that hard. She was already worn out, and now she was just going to exhaust herself more.

Spiker leaned backwards, rested her head on the floor, and drifted back into a fitful sleep.

When she woke, she checked the battered and slightly unreliable clock, which told her it was past ten. She sighed. Sponge should have been back by then. Mr. Spielberg must have been treating her roughly. Spiker was feeling much better; she pushed herself up on her elbows and then stood shakily. Then she walked over to the sink and began rinsing potatoes and celery for the girls’ signature soup. Three minutes later she was busy at the cutting board; she’d already put water on to boil. Sponge had looked out for her; now it was time to repay the favor. That’s just what sisters do.

***

By the time she was done at Mr. Spielberg’s, Sponge’s entire body seemed positively on fire. Her very bones were agonizingly sore, and all she wanted to do was go home and sleep. But she couldn’t, because she needed to cook for Spiker and hopefully gulp down some soup herself, go over tomorrow’s schedule, check on the garden, count the money and plan what they would buy on their market day, and set some beans to soak overnight for tomorrow’s meal.

Sponge let herself in through the rickety gate, limping wearily. Then she paused and sniffed the air. It almost smelled like her and Spiker’s traditional potato-celery-lentil soup. But it was just a trick of her senses. She’d been thinking about food, and so naturally…

But the smell grew stronger as she walked up the hill, and by the time she reached the cottage door she was almost certain it was real. Staggering now with exhaustion, Sponge pushed open the door and stumbled inside, into the strong waiting arms of her sister. Sponge gave a moan of confusion; in a few seconds, Spiker had sat her down by the fire, wrapped the blanket around her, and gently placed a steaming hot bowl of soup into her hands. Seconds later, Spiker sat down next to her twin with her own cup of soup.

There was a companionable silence for a few moments. Then Sponge began, “What—?”

Spiker cut her off gently. “I woke up feeling much better, and all I could think about was you, exhausted, still out there working for Spielberg. So I figured this”—she waved a hand over the bowls of soup—“was the least I could do.”

Sponge nodded slightly. “I don’t feel too good either,” she admitted. “And listen to your voice; you’re still sick.” She frowned. “What’s tomorrow like?”

Spiker smiled. “Tomorrow we stay home.”

Sponge’s head snapped towards her sister. “But we need the money.”

Spiker shook her head. “We really don’t, though. We have trees for firewood, the rainbarrel for water. We can go a day without working.”

And so they did. And before long it was two days when they didn’t have any jobs; and soon after that, an entire week. The girls purchased three chickens at the beginning of spring; by midsummer their garden was prospering and they were able to barter or sell excess crops. Spiker and Sponge began to do a brisk business selling vegetables and eggs, and by the time the next winter rolled around they were well-clothed with warm boots and even knitted hats, had plenty of much more varied food to eat, and had even hired someone to patch the holes in the walls. The girls’ cheeks grew more rosy, their eyes brighter.

One day the two young women were walking back from the marketplace, carrying a basket of assorted vegetables and meats. They were chatting absentmindedly, lightly, not particularly worrying about anything. But then, suddenly, there was an unwelcome voice from their left.

“ _ Spiker?  _ Sponge?” The voice sounded shocked, incredulous. Spiker and Sponge both spun, crouching in defensive positions, their eyes narrowed suspiciously. And then they found the source of the voice.

It was Lillian, but…  _ not _ her. Her eyes were bright and clear, the blazing, uncontrollable fury gone from them. Her hands were by her side, not clenched in fists. Her face was shining with contentedness, and there was no trace of tear-streaks or of pain. She looked healthy. She looked happy.

By Lillian’s side stood a man who looked about her age. Glancing at his left hand, Spiker saw a wedding ring glittering there. Her eyes shot to Lillian’s hand; she, too, was wearing a wedding band. The man looked utterly shocked to see them, as if perhaps Lillian had told him about Spiker and Sponge but hadn’t mentioned how small, prickly, and defensive they’d be. 

Lillian took a small step towards her sisters. “Spiker, Sponge, please; I—”

Spiker turned her back. “We don’t want to talk to you, Lillian.” She started to walk away, in step with Sponge.

“No! Listen!” Lillian cried out, but the younger twins ignored her and continued to move away. Lillian broke from her husband’s side and darted in front of them. “ _ Please.  _ Listen to me,” she begged.

“No!” Sponge’s answer was firm. She started to turn, but Lillian put a hand on her shoulder and held her back. Sponge’s eyes glittered dangerously and she wrenched herself from Lillian’s grasp, growling, “ _ Don’t touch me _ .”

Hatred was coursing through both Spiker’s and Sponge’s veins. They were both shuddering, staring at their sister, fearful and furious. But they forced themselves to stand their ground.

“Fine.” Spiker took Sponge’s hand in hers. “We’ll listen. For sixty seconds. And only if you don’t ever touch either of us.”

Lillian exhaled slowly. “Fine. I guess that’s all I can ask.” She bit her lip, closed her eyes and collected herself, then looked up. “I just want to say that I’m sorry. I was so devastated by—by Lucille’s death, and it made me do some things I shouldn’t have. I want you to know that I love you and I always have, and—”

“ _ What _ ?” Suddenly Sponge couldn’t keep silent; she was too incredulous. “You  _ love us _ ? You  _ always have _ ? Where was  _ that  _ attitude five years ago when you beat us bloody just because we spilled a cup of water? Where was  _ that  _ attitude when you used to tell us we were the most worthless people you’d ever seen and we’d never amount to anything? Where was  _ that  _ attitude when we were eight and you would punch us and slap us for no reason at all? When you ignored us when we begged for food? When you  _ sold  _ us, sold us to an horrible, abusive man? I don’t know about you, Lillian, but I wouldn’t call that love.”

“Yes—I know—that wasn’t love. That’s what I’m trying to say, Spiker, I—”

“I’m Sponge.”

“Right—yes—that’s right, I know that—”

“We don’t even look that much alike, at least manage to not get us mixed up—”

“I know, okay? I’m sorry!” The words were torn from Lillian’s lips. “What I’m trying to say is that mentally I was in a completely awful place. It was—it was torture for me, and it made me do some bad things—”

“It was torture for  _ you _ ? Are you serious right now? Do you really have any idea—”

“Can you just let me finish, Sponge?  _ Please _ ?” Lillian’s face was flushed. “I wouldn’t have done that to you if I’d been in control of my mind. But I wasn’t. It’s hard and it was hard, and I was essentially going through hell mentally. It doesn’t excuse my behavior. But I want to say I’m sorry. I want you to forgive me.”

“Forgive you.” Spiker’s voice was like ice. At once, it chilled the air that had been growing warm with the force of the very heated argument. “Let’s look at this from our perspective for once, Lillian.

“Remember that one day? When I was supposed to be cleaning the kitchen for Sandra, but you forced me to weed the garden? By the time I got back to the kitchen, I didn’t have enough time to actually clean it properly, and Sandra was furious. I  _ knew  _ how angry Sandra was going to be, Lillian. I’d felt her fists so many times before. You essentially sentenced me to being punished by her when you demanded I weed the garden. 

“But then you came in, and you essentially did Sandra’s work for her. Not only did you punch me at least twice, you kicked me in the head, and that knocked me out for hours. I had a throbbing headache for days afterwards.

“That’s not even the worst you’ve done to me, Lillian. And yet you want me to forgive you? Why on earth should I? Somebody who beats a child bloody, kicks them in the head, knocks them out, constantly insults them and makes them feel inferior—that person is clearly a child abuser and not fit to be around kids at all. That was  _ you.  _ And now you want us to say, oh, no, it’s okay, we don’t care about any of that. Well—well—”

Spiker’s voice broke then and tears started to bead in her eyes. With a quick glance at her sister, Sponge took over.

“Well, we do care, Lillian. We’re not going to forget. And if you want forgiveness, well, then, you’re out of luck. You say you love us? You should’ve  _ shown  _ us that eight years ago. You should’ve shown it when we were  eleven and Sandra was treating us like slaves. You should’ve shown it to us when we were thirteen and almost dying from starvation, when you stopped using our real names and addressed us like servants, when we were forced to call both you and Sandra ‘ma’am’. You should’ve shown it when we were fifteen and were sold like property to Mr. O’Hara. But you didn’t. So now you’re out of luck.”

Then she turned and, with Spiker, walked determinedly away from Lillian, without looking back.

This time, Lillian didn’t stop them.

***

Life passed easily for the next few years. Lillian eventually moved with Anthony to a house a bit farther away, so she didn’t cross paths with her younger sisters much. Only twice did they see each other; both times, Spiker and Sponge flatly refused to say even one word to Lillian.

One day, about two years after the confrontation, Spiker came home with a rarity, a newspaper. The girls generally got all the information they needed from the marketplace’s gossip, but they occasionally liked to read the paper, just… well, because they could.

Sponge was busy trying out a new enchilada recipe; Spiker had been bartering in the marketplace. She took off her snowy hood, stomped her boots free of snow, and sat down at the table to read.

All was well and good for a few seconds as the young women worked in companionable silence. But then Spiker let out a cry of anger, and began to tear at the newspaper with her hands. There was fire blazing in her eyes. At once, Sponge was by her side, peering concernedly into her face. “Spiker, what is it? What’s wrong?”

All Spiker could do was point to the paper. It had been folded over to a list of new babies born the previous month. Sponge looked over at it, and almost immediately saw what the problem was.

In the middle column, about halfway down, was a photograph of a baby boy, perhaps three weeks old, smiling slightly. Sponge began to read out loud, her confusion lessening with each word.

“ ‘Anthony Trotter and Lillian Trotter (nee: Harrisburg) are proud to announce the birth of their first child, James Henry Trotter, who was born on November 18, 1955. He was born in good health, and—’ ”

“Lillian Harrisburg,” Spiker interrupted. “Look how she’s coming back. And now she has a child? That horrid woman shouldn’t be allowed to be around children.”

“The worst part is she seems happy,” Sponge concurred. “She’s found a way to become happy. But when she was miserable, she made us miserable, and she ruined both of our lives for us forever. She beat us, she screamed at us, she made us feel useless and horrible. And now she’s finding a happy life. That’s not okay…”

Sponge’s voice broke and tears began to stream down the young woman’s cheek. Her soul was black and chock full of anguish and despair—and, most of all, hatred. She suddenly loathed Lillian even more than she ever had. Lillian was an awful person, an  _ awful  _ person; and suddenly she hated Anthony Trotter too, and little James Henry Trotter, and the entire community that had let this happen. And twenty-year-old Sponge was back to the thoughts she’d suffered through seven years before:

_ Someday, I’m going to get back at them all. _

***

When they weren’t thinking about Lillian, Spiker and Sponge thrived during the next seven years. Their garden was greatly expanded, and they began growing crops specifically to trade. They knew the Weston family was a fan of kale, so there was an entire patch dedicated “the Weston patch” devoted to mostly kale-growing. Spiker and Sponge could always count on the Curtis children to have an appetite for potatoes; they sold to all six of the Curtis girls; all but one, a small blonde girl who went by the name of Emily. Spiker and Sponge had even bought a few young fruit trees—including an apple tree and a peach tree—that they were painstakingly hard work to take care of but promised mouthwatering treats if and when they flowered. The girls—young women now—still used water sparingly, but they weren’t limited to one shower a week each. If they ever got into a pinch, they could trade for water.

People tolerated them, and yes, some respected them. That’s not to say many people  _ liked  _ them. They were still sulky and disagreeable, short-tempered and fierce. The local children knew not to tangle with them…  _ or else.  _ And whenever the name “Lillian Harrisburg”—or, more commonly these days, “Lillian Trotter”—was mentioned, the twins would get practically livid, see red, and physically unleash their fury on anyone or anything who happened to be in their vicinity. 

There was nothing in the world that could possibly have made Spiker and Sponge hate Lillian more than they already did—or so they thought. But there was one more completely unexpected development in March 1960, when they were twenty-five years old.

The twins had slept in that morning, in cozy beds they’d had built the previous winter. It had been Spiker’s turn to cook breakfast, and she was going to try a new recipe for green pepper-onion-omelets a man at the marketplace had recommended. The women were just sitting down to their breakfast when there came a tap at the glass windows; again, another new feature of the home that Spiker and Sponge had installed a few years ago.

It was a messenger from a post office a few miles away, and he carried a telegram, which he handed to Sponge. Her eyes were dark and glittering with suspicion, like they always were when an outsider came into the midst of her and her sister. Today, at least, she was right to be suspicious. The message that the telegram contained was completely unexpected, and not well-received. It enraged Spiker and Sponge, made them madder than they’d been in a long time; possibly even more furious than when they read the newspaper article about Lillian’s husband and son.

This, surprisingly, also had to do with Lillian’s family. But it was worse than the article had been.

_ Dear Spiker and Sponge -(STOP)- We are saddened to inform you of the death of your older sister Lillian and her husband Anthony -(STOP)- They were killed in a tragic attack leaving their four year old son James alone with no place to go -(STOP)- As you are James’ last living relatives you are now his official guardians and he will remain under your care until his eighteenth birthday -(STOP)- You will be given money to cover expenses related to your care of James -(STOP)-   _

The joy Spiker and Sponge felt at the news of Lillian’s death was quashed almost immediately at the hatred they felt for little James, who they’d never even met. Although it stood to reason that if he was Lillian’s son he would know to mistreat Spiker and Sponge and treat them as servants, not as family.

And if he was Lillian’s son, he deserved to be punished for each and every thing Lillian had done to hurt Spiker and Sponge. Every time she’d mistreated them or called them “Girl!” instead of their real names, every time she’d ignored them, ordered them around, stared through them, glared at them, or screamed at them—James was going to suffer for that. Oh yes, he was.

But more so, Spiker and Sponge were going to treat their nephew  _ exactly  _ like Lillian had treated her sisters. It was a perfect example of karma, in their views: Lillian treats her sisters as servants, orders them around, ignores them, doesn’t love them; now Spiker and Sponge would treat their nephew as a servant, order him around, ignore them, and not love them. If Lillian was willing to treat other people that way, then she was certainly willing for herself—and her son—to be treated that way.

Spiker and Sponge first saw James when he was brought up to their ramshackle cottage by the director of the local orphanage. He looked healthy and chipper; his stomach was full; his legs were strong and stable. But the most noticeable thing about seven-year-old James Henry Trotter, to Spiker and Sponge, was his face. Because little James had Lillian’s face.

From his sea-blue eyes to the gentle curve of his cheeks, everything about James’ features had been echoed in Lillian’s face. If his hair had been longer, halfway down his back instead of just below his ears, and a slight shade lighter, he would have been nearly impossible to tell apart from Lillian. It threw both Spiker and Sponge for a moment; and then it only added to their prejudices against James. To Spiker and Sponge, it seemed that they had a younger version of Lillian there to get back at and to punish, which only made them hurt James all the more.

When he came to them, little James was only seven years old; but that didn’t make Spiker or Sponge treat him lightly. The minute James was left alone with them, when the orphanage director’s figure had disappeared down the hill, Spiker seized James by the collar and lifted him so the two were face-to-face; James’ feet dangled perhaps a yard off the ground. Spiker slammed the boy against the wall of the house and held him there, still hanging in the air.

“Look, James,” she said in a low growl; “this is how it’s going to be. Your mother mistreated and abused us like you have no idea. She ignored us, she treated us like her servants, she—”

“My mother,” cried James, interrupting Spiker with anger in his eyes, “was a good person!”

“Oh really.” Spiker’s voice was dark and dangerous. “And what makes you think that?”

“She was—she was nice to me,” James began falteringly, timid and hesitant now, “and she—she took me to the beach, and she—”

Sponge cut James off with a harsh, mirthless laugh. “Sounds like she was nicer to you than she ever was to us. We’re Lillian’s sisters, James, and she didn’t  _ take us to the beach _ .” Sponge mocked James’ frightened, high-pitched voice with the last phrase. “She ordered us about like servants. But James, if Lillian was willing to treat us that way, she’d undoubtedly be willing for herself—or her son—to be treated exactly the same way. Right?”

James had gone silent with fear, trying to work out what his aunts were telling him. He was still hanging from Spiker’s grip on his collar; the cloth had started to cut into his neck, blocking some of the air from reaching his head. James gave a tiny whimper, recoiling, cowering away from Spiker’s grip.

Sponge laughed, pleased by the fear on the little boy’s face. “Let him down,” she said under her breath to her sister. They couldn’t instill any hatred into James, so that he would be inclined to fight; they had to keep him completely isolated and afraid. The boy’s aunts knew exactly how to manipulate James’ feelings to hurt him most; they’d had firsthand experience.

Their first confrontation with James had the intended effect. When Spiker lowered James back to the ground, he sagged to his knees, his legs weak and unsteady for a second; then he slowly got to his feet, cowering away from Spiker and Sponge with pure terror in his eyes.

The two sisters smiled at each other. Oh, how it good it felt to see fear in James’ eyes—those bright blue eyes that would fit just as perfectly in Lillian’s face—and know that finally, finally they were getting their long-awaited revenge.

_ Oh, just you wait, James… Your life is going to be a living hell—just like ours was. _


	8. Pain Passed On

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one’s shorter - but enjoy!

The early-morning June sun woke Spiker one morning. She rolled over, pressing her face into her pillow, not wanting to stand up. She would just drift back into a sweet sleep now… 

Suddenly, a tremendous clattering came from the kitchen; it made Spiker start. She gave a groan of annoyance at being disturbed. Sponge, who had been woken by the crash, was in a much worse mood. She sat bolt upright, a look of fury on her face. She glanced at her sister, then murmured, “I’ll deal with him.” Spiker nodded.

Sponge walked out of the room, yelling at the top of her lungs, her voice filled to the brim with anger. Spiker could hear her as she reached the kitchen, could hear the crisp, familiar sound of her hand slapping James’ young cheek. James gave a cry, and desperate, inaudible words were torn from his lips. Spiker gave a small smile of satisfaction, listening to her nephew’s pain.

Spiker slowly began to get up and change into her daytime clothes. She reached for a red dress, the exact color of raspberry jelly. Raspberries… oh, wouldn’t a raspberry cake taste good right now! She should have James make one today…

Spiker was suddenly thrown by that thought. Was this what it had felt like to be Sandra and Lillian? If they wanted something, they would just have somebody else do it? Well, Spiker reasoned, she’d done her time being the one who did everything; now she could be the one who everyone did things for. 

Again, it was only fair.

Spiker finished dressing, looking out at the warm day. It had been just over three months since James had come to live with her and Sponge. He had proved relatively easy to train, to control.

Spiker could tell James didn’t know why his aunts hated him so much. He was incredibly oblivious, which only made it all the more painful for him. But it also made hurting him just that much more satisfying.

Spiker finished dressing and began to comb out her hair, which she had let grow to midway down her back. She pulled it into a single braid down her back, then turned to the bathroom and scrubbed her face clean. She massaged her hands against her temples to wake herself up; then she turned and started down the small hallway to the kitchen.

James was standing on a rickety stool to reach the stove, where he was struggling to manage a cast-iron pan that was sizzling with scrambled eggs. Spiker could see a new bruise forming on his left cheek, the obvious result of Sponge’s recent slap. He was trembling visibly, taking deep breaths, trying to calm himself. Spiker just stood there, looking at him without saying a word; he seemed to wilt slightly under her glare, and lowered his head even further. Spiker gave a wide smile of satisfaction, which her sister mirrored. James snuck a glance up at them with large, terrified eyes, before breaking the look and focusing on his task. 

Spiker and Sponge were both starting to get James and Lillian mixed up in their heads. Consciously, of course they knew they weren’t berating and punishing their older sister, but beneath the surface, the two started to blend together. The fact that physically their resemblance was incredible was nearly behind the point—the mix-ups came from a psychological place.

That morning, Sponge sent James out to the marketplace with strict orders not to breathe a word about what was going on at home. When he worked up the courage to ask why, Sponge burst out laughing and told him to ask the vendors about Emily; then she gave him a hard shove out the door, and he stumbled a few steps down the hill before he caught his balance.

With the addition of James to do the majority of their housework, Spiker and Sponge had the time to do something completely unfamiliar:  _ relax _ . They hadn’d had the chance to do that since age eight, at least, and even then they were constantly on the lookout to escape Sandra’s and Lillian’s bouts of fury. And once Spiker and Sponge spent an hour a day not doing anything, it was so easy to fall into the trap of spending two, three, four, eight hours a day doing nothing, and leaving all of the maintenance associated with running a household to James. They received a steady stream of income from selling their excess crops and produce, plenty to live comfortably and have a reasonable amount left over for sudden splurges. It wasn’t like anything  _ demanded  _ their attention. Yes, maybe James would benefit from a little help, but he didn’t need it; and he was perfectly capable of handling it. If it left him a little distraught sometimes, well, then, that was only half as distraught as Spiker and Sponge had been throughout their entire childhood.

But James was not quite five, and he just couldn’t see that far into the situation. He could barely make the connection that “Lillian” meant his mother and not some other random human being. James saw Lillian only as the bright-eyed, energetic mother she’d been to him, and he couldn’t even imagine her as a secluded, suspicious fifteen-year-old who would hurt her sisters and damage them beyond repair. James had no idea why Spiker and Sponge seemed to hate him so much—or, perhaps more accurately, hate his last name—but it hurt him, damaged him from the inside out, made him think that people’s default reaction when they met him was hate.

Sponge stood at the door to James’ small cellar room a few days before the boy’s fifth birthday, her ear pressed against the keyhole. James was sitting against the far wall, clutching his head, trying to breathe properly as his body convulsed in chest-wracking sobs. His entire body was shuddering, and his stomach was so painfully twisted up in knots that it made him feel like he wanted to vomit. Sweat stood out in his forehead, and his eyes were closed in agony.

Sponge couldn’t see James, but she could hear him, and the sound of his tears filled her heart with pleasure—because his sobs immediately reminded her of another dark night, when Spiker, perhaps eight years old, had lain down on the floor with her fingers interlocked behind her neck and cried and screamed for hours on end, shaking and trembling with the force of the entire world’s fury. She’d been crying because of Lillian; earlier that day, Lillian had hit her for the first time.

Sitting outside the door, Sponge began to think. If they were really supposed to keep James until he was eighteen, then that was a full thirteen more years and a few months. Well, that was a lot. He’d be an enormous burden, especially when he was older, fifteen perhaps, and growing more rebellious. Perhaps she and Spiker could make some good money hiring him out, or even selling him. Now wouldn’t that be an idea, selling the boy! But they’d have to make sure that the orphanage-place-thing James had come from didn’t find out, because Spiker and Sponge were being paid a modest amount to keep James.

Oh well, Sponge thought, as she got up and locked James’ door from the outside, making sure he could hear the audible turn of the key in the padlock; they’d just have to wait and see.


	9. The Agony of Memories

By the time James had been living with his aunts for a year, he was so completely different from the boy he’d been when he arrived that the physical differences alone would have been shocking. The largest changes came in his face: his eyes were darker, always afraid; his cheeks were hollower, less rosy. Spiker and Sponge relished the external changes in him, laughing at him both behind his back and in front of it, as they themselves grew healthier and more robust.

Far more apparent were the psychological and the behavioral differences. For the first two or three months, James would continually beg to be taken to the seashore, and his voice would be perky and eternally hopeful. But lately he would only stare down at the beach a few miles away a that he could just barely see, a lost, forlorn look on his face. He would never speak a word unless directly asked a question, and he absolutely refused to make eye contact with either of his aunts. Spiker and Sponge heard from the market vendors that James was the same way around them, never looking them in the eyes, quiet, meek, and always shying away from their raised hands and their balled fists, even if they weren’t aimed at him.

Weeks passed; then months; then entire seasons. The time when they’d had to actually work was so distant in Spiker’s and Sponge’s memories, and the memories of that time grew more and more foggy with each passing day. James’ memories of a time when he _hadn’t_ been ordered around every second of every day rapidly lost clarity, too. Before long it was winter, and James was eight. His November birthday had passed, but Spiker and Sponge paid it no mind. Neither of them actually even knew the exact date of his birth; they’d been too furious to properly digest the information they’d read in the newspaper so many years ago.

By spring 1961, Spiker’s and Sponge’s garden was prospering, doing better than it ever had, mostly because of James’ manual labor under Sponge’s hawkeye watch. Spiker and Sponge enjoyed spending long days outside, watching James struggle to follow the dangerous orders they’d given him, seeing only themselves at that same age, Lillian and Sandra presiding over them.

The year passed generally the same as the last. James became a little more physically able as he aged, and by nine, Spiker and Sponge had him chopping wood for their kitchen stove. As more and more pressure was put on him from his aunts, James became more and more desperate, closer and closer to the depths of despair.

One morning he hadn’t come out from his room when Spiker had hollered for it. After ten minutes, fury boiling in them, they barged into James’ room to find him huddling in a corner, writing what seemed to be a letter. Silent tears were streaming down his young face; his blue eyes more full of pain than Spiker and Sponge had ever seen them. He was so absorbed in his task that he didn’t hear Spiker and Sponge enter the room; a silent look passed between the women, and ever-so-quietly, they snuck up behind their nephew’s back.

James jolted and gave a cry of fright when he felt Spiker’s hand on the back of his collar, hauling him to his feet. He stumbled, throwing out his arms for balance; and dropped the paper. With a sly smile, Sponge plucked it from the ground and waved it tauntingly in his face, before passing it off to Spiker.

Spiker had barely read the first sentence when fury kicked in. But she carefully kept her face devoid of any emotion as she passed the letter to Sponge. Taking a cue from her sister, Sponge kept her face blank too as she read what James had written.

_Dear Mama,_

_I miss you. I can barely remember you now, it’s been so long. I don’t like it here. I don’t like my aunts. They don’t like me either, and they say it’s because of you. I know that’s not true. You’re a good person. You’ve never done anything wrong in your life. You’ve never mistreated anyone. Aunt Spiker and Aunt Sponge say you hit them and yelled at them and treated them like servants, but don’t worry, I don’t believe it. I know you would never do anything like that and I know that they’re lying to me to try to hurt me._

_Please come back. Please help me. I’m lost and I can’t seem to find my way home. Come here. I miss you. I want you. I n_

The letter cut off there. James was fearfully watching his aunts’ faces, searching for any trace of anger, any sign that he might be in immediate danger.

Spiker’s mouth pressed into a firm line. “James,” she whispered. “You have _no idea_ what you’re talking about. You really don’t. _Believe_ us. Lillian Trotter was an evil, manipulative, abusive teenager, and a horrid, heartless adult. She was completely awful. And if you think that you are a remotely kind or good human being, you wouldn’t want to so much as associate with her, much less tell her you love her.”

Then Spiker knelt down, her face an inch from James’. “Admit it,” she whispered. “Tell me; say to me that Lillian was terrible and abusive. Say it to me.”

James’ entire body was trembling; his neck was craned back so his face was as far as possible from Spiker’s, which was still less than a foot. He was biting his lip with terrible force, trying to hold back his tears; but Spiker and Sponge saw the tears anyways, making his bright blue eyes glisten with their wetness.

James’ aunts waited for about thirty seconds; then, when it became clear that James was not going to speak, they stood up. Suddenly, seized by a burning, spontaneous desire, Spogne grabbed a long, wooden-handled broom, and cracked James across the back with it, hard, twice. Then she and Spiker swept from the room, their ears ringing with James’ cries, and locked his door.

It took a long time for Spiker and Sponge to calm down. When they finally did, they decided to keep James locked up for five days with nothing but water. James’ continual defense and even worship of Lillian was more than either of them could really bear. Why couldn’t he seem to understand what an awful person his mother had been?

For five days they ignored the sound of James’ fists pounding on the cellar door, the sound of his pleading cries that split the air. And when they finally let him out, he was even more frightened of them; he was so scared, in fact, that the quality of his housework began to decline, and both parties became angrier and more miserable.

The abuse just kept getting worse after that. The rift between James and Spiker and Sponge had grown, if possible, even wider; Spiker and Sponge grew even more angry; James grew even more despondent. Fall 1961 was awful for James, and it only made Spiker and Sponge more furious at him, which only made it even more awful for James…

The winter of ’61-’62 was painful and seemed to last for eternity. Spiker and Sponge grew more and more irritated with James, and they became much crueler, even more so than they had been before. Spiker and Sponge felt themselves drifting slightly farther apart, and made the conscious effort to be more open and friendly with each other. Within a few weeks, they were again as close as they had been when they were fourteen.

By the melting of the winter’s snow, James’ face was consistantly covered in bruises and he was walking with a pronounced limp, the permanent result of a break that had not been allowed to heal properly. His voice, his body language, and even his eyes had grown more and more timid as he realized there was no way he could escape or fight against his aunts’ wrath.

With the spring came a whole new score of household tasks, and nearly all of them were delegated to James. He was tasked with everything from chopping wood to looking after the animals; soon there would be more, as Spiker and Sponge had finally gotten two of their chickens to mate. The hen had laid seven eggs, and Spiker and Sponge planned to have the chicks grow, then kill them for meat. (Neither of the women had any qualms about saying the word _kill_ —if their plan was to kill the animals for meat, then that was that, and any other word would still be saying the same thing.) Since James was growing older—he was ten now—Spiker and Sponge reasoned that they could start to be even harder on him and he’d be able to take it.

James wasn’t able to take it. Every night would end with him in tears. Spiker and Sponge knew it, and they laughed about it, and they relished it. James was consumed with a fierce, burning desire to _never_ cry in front of his aunts; and so of course it became a game, Spiker competing against Sponge to see who could get James to shed a tear in front of them first. Spiker was a quicker thinker, and so she usually won: she could read James very well, would know what she had to say to hurt him most psychologically at any given time. James tried with all his might to give Spiker no reason whatsoever to hurt him; what he couldn’t know was that Spiker’s treatment of him had nothing to do with the quality of his work around the house.

One day in early May James was out in the garden, chopping an old tree that had fallen down a few weeks ago into firewood. The tree had been very large, and the wood was hard, and the work was grueling, especially for such a young boy. Spiker sat placidly in a garden chair, simply watching James, analyzing the way his face changed and his eyes shifted, trying to pry her way into his head without saying a word.

_What can I do that would hurt James most right now?_

And Spiker decided that simply not saying a word would hurt James the most. Ignoring him, leaving him to suffer on his own—isolating him, essentially—would do the most mental harm. So Spiker didn’t say a word to James, and when, at one point, sweat dripping into his eyes, he looked pleadingly at her, she didn’t respond; she only angled her head slightly towards the chopping-block, as if to say, _Get back to work._ James lowered his eyes, his breath shuddering, and got back to work.

Sponge walked out of the house a few minutes later, holding two glasses of ice-cold lemonade. The drink was a treat from the marketplace—Spiker and Sponge’s garden had done quite well during the last few months, and they had the extra money—and it had been a favorite of both Spiker and Sponge for many years. When James heard the slight clink of the ice in the glass Sponge held out for her sister, he looked up, his eyes more full of pain than either of the sisters could ever remember seeing them; they were pure, full of pleading. But when his eyes met Sponge’s, hers were cold; he opened his mouth, but Sponge only slapped the side of his face, hard, and stared threateningly at him until he meekly went back to work.

Spiker and Sponge knew exactly what was happening to their nephew, and what their role had been in causing it. James was drowning in the depths of despair, trying to swim, struggling to keep his head above the thick, tarry material that was depression. He was being destroyed from the inside out. And Spiker and Sponge knew _exactly_ how it felt.

James stopped his work for a second and slumped down on the chopping-block, his head bowed, struggling to hold himself together.

_Why should we let him hold himself together at all?_

“What’s the matter with you?” Spiker cried, jumping to her feet and taking a few quick steps over towards James. She glared at him. James stared back, his lips trembling. And then he burst into tears.

Sponge was not about to let James get away with crying. “Stop that immediately and get on with your work, you nasty little beast!” she spat, voice dripping with venom. She knew how painful those exact words would be—they’d been uttered to her over a decade ago.

James bowed his head; then he looked back up, and in his eyes, his aunts saw absolute despair. Then the boy scrambled to his feet and sprinted away from his aunts. Sponge picked up the chopper and held it threateningly, making to sprint after James; Spiker stopped her with a slight raise of her hand.

“Let him be,” she murmured. “We’ll punish him later.”

As she spoke, Spiker stifled a yawn. Sponge tilted her head, looking at her concernedly. “Are you all right?”

Spiker shrugged. “I didn’t sleep great last night; that’s all.”

Sponge looked at her. “Take a nap,” she suggested lightly. “You won’t miss anything; and you really could do with the rest.”

Spiker cocked her head. “I think I will,” she murmured. With a nod from her sister, she strolled through the door, crawled into her bed, tucked the covers up to her chin, and drifted into sleep.

***

_It was far from restless. Spiker’s mind wouldn’t let her sleep peacefully that day, for whatever reason._

_Spiker was having a horrible dream, a recurring nightmare that had haunted her for years. She was sitting in the entry hall of her childhood home, staring in horror at her twin sister’s body, lying mutilated and bloody on the floor. Sandra and Lillian were standing over her, laughing cruelly. Spiker tried to run over to them, but found she couldn’t move. With a jolt, she realized she was tied to a chair. Spiker screamed out, calling for her mother and sister._

_“What did you do to Sponge?” she demanded through tears._

_Lillian crossed over to her, her face hard, cruel, and manipulative. “We didn’t do anything,” she said. “It was all you, Spiker. It was all you, you worthless, lying, nasty little creep!”_

_And suddenly Spiker saw that there was a bloody kitchen knife in her hand. She gave a gasp of horror, and tears flooded from her eyes. She knew with all her might that she hadn’t killed her sister. She was more than a hundred percent positive that it had been Sandra or Lillian. They’d framed her! She hadn’t done it! She knew she hadn’t done it! How could she have, when she was tied to a chair in the middle of the hall?_

_“I didn’t!” Spiker screamed, a pounding headache setting in. “It wasn’t me!”_

_Sandra angled her head, her gray eyes cold as ice. “But the evidence is right there in your hand,” she cooed. “You have the knife right there.”_

_“You did it; you framed me! I swear it wasn’t me!”_

_“Clearly it was. How can you deny it? And now you’re lying again, you stupid—”_

_“I’m telling you, it wasn’t me!”_

_Lillian leaned closer to her face and whispered dangerously. “You were found holding the knife. That’s what we’ll say. It’s our word against yours, Spiker. And who do you think people will believe?”_

_Spiker screamed in fury and exasperation. “I didn’t do it! I did not kill my sister! You can’t honestly think I would! Nobody can think I would!”_

_But Lillian was smiling cruelly. “Oh, Spiker. How horribly disillusioned you are.” She shook her head patronizingly. Then she smiled even wider._

_“Oh, Spiker, you lovely horrible idiot girl. You listen to me very, very carefully, okay?” She leaned in close. “Raise your right hand and repeat after me. ‘I, Spiker Harrisburg, am a worthless, lying little girl. And nobody will ever be interested in anything I have to say. Not today, not tomorrow, not ever, ever, ever!’”_

_Spiker couldn’t take it. “I didn’t kill Sponge! I swear it! I swear it on my life!”_

_Shaking her head, Lillian stepped back. “Didn’t you hear me, Spiker? Nobody will listen. Nobody will care.”_

***

Spiker woke up trembling, in a cold sweat. She pressed her clammy hands against her eyes, taking deep breaths, trying to calm herself down, repeating over and over again:

_It’s okay. You didn’t kill Sponge. She’s safe._

Spiker shook her head depressedly. She’d go months without that nightmare, and she would think she’d gotten rid of it, and then it would spring on her, unexpectedly, make her shake and cry.

Spiker raised her head to see Sponge standing at the door, her face a mask of concern. She walked over to Sponge’s bed and sat gently on it, wiping Spiker’s flushed, sweaty face with a cool washcloth.

“The Nightmare again?” she said gently, and Spiker nodded. Sponge didn’t know the exact details of Spiker’s recurring dream, but she knew it involved her murder and Spiker’s accusation and being told that she would be accused of killing her sister forever. No matter how many times she assured Spiker the dream wasn’t true, it wouldn’t go away. It broke Sponge’s heart to see Spiker suffer so much, being accused of something she hadn’t done and that she never ever would do.

Then Sponge turned to her sister. “Is there something from that dream that you can use?” she said quietly. “Something that Sandra or Lillian said that particularly hurt you, that you can use against James?”

Spiker stared up at her, and then slowly—ever so slowly—she nodded. She bit her lip as her mind flashed back to the awful words Lillian had tried to get her to repeat: _I, Sponge Trotter, am a worthless, lying little girl. And nobody will ever be interested in anything I have to say. Not today, not tomorrow, not ever, ever, ever!_

Spiker opened her dry lips and spoke in a rasping whisper. “Yes,” she said quietly. “And I’m going to use it.”

Sponge nodded. “Good for you.” She smiled ruefully. “Who knows, it might even help dispel the nightmare for good.”

Spiker smiled a bit too. “Who knows,” she echoed wistfully.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The dream sequence is going to be very important later on! ;)


	10. A New Life on the Horizon

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A few notes:
> 
> £100 in 1962, when this chapter takes place, is equivalent to £2120 in 2017. £2120 is equivalent to $2605.64. Thanks to http://inflation.stephenmorley.org/ for the inflation calculator and to http://www.x-rates.com/calculator/?from=GBP&to=USD for the British Pounds to US Dollars calculator.
> 
> The “James and the Giant Peach” musical songs were written by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul. (See if you can find the reference!)

When Spiker and Sponge went back outside to look for James, it was dusk. He hadn’t responded to their yells, and they were growing angry. Spiker and Sponge were spread out across their garden, searching for him; if he’d tried to run away, he certainly wasn’t going to get very far. 

Suddenly they saw him, kneeling beneath their ancient peach tree, the one that had never given any fruit despite the market vendor’s promises. His hands were scrambling over the ground, trying to catch something; but then, as his aunts watched, he sat back and gave up. A quick glance passed between the sisters, and then they stormed over to him.

James was kneeling back on his heels, looking both horrified and curious. His hand was still hovering over the ground. Spiker cocked her head for a second, trying to read James’ face, but then she shook herself. 

“What on earth are you doing?” she cried, sweeping her foot out to knock James’ legs from under him, so he sprawled at her feet on the grass. Lying on his back, James looked up in horror and fear.

“I—I just—well—”

Sponge shook her head. “It doesn’t even matter, James; whatever it is, it’s not what we asked you to do.”

A million emotions swept over James—guilt, fear, pain, anticipation. Then it passed, and he controlled his face, as he’d learned to do. 

Spiker shook her head and gave a slight laugh. “Oh, James. You never learn, do you?” She grabbed his collar and hauled him to his feet, then shoved him towards Sponge, who grabbed him—seeing Lillian’s face in his now more than ever—and dragged him towards the house.

But then Spiker saw something. She stared, then did a double-take, then looked from James’ face to Sponge’s to back at what she was looking at. Her brow creased. And then she cried out:

“Sponge!  _ Sponge!  _ Come here, you’ve got to see this!” Her sister scrambled over and her eyes followed Spiker’s upturned finger to where it pointed to a plump and juicy, bright golden peach sitting on the highest branch.

And then, right before their eyes... the peach grew.

Sponge gave a little cry of shock and released her hold on James as she clapped both hands to her mouth. Spiker and Sponge just stood there, shoulder-to-shoulder, and stared at the tree as the peach grew ever-so-slightly larger under their gazes. Little by little, slowly but surely, the peach was growing to a fruit of enormous proportions. Spiker and Sponge even had to back up to avoid being crushed by it. 

They stood there through the night, and by the time the moon set the peach had to be as big as their house. And as the sun began to rise, the news that Spiker and Sponge had a peach bigger than the entire peach  _ tree _ had begun to swarm around town. Reporters were storming up to the garden gate.

Spiker and Sponge exchanged quick, giddy glances.  Here was the world giving them their lucky break! Here was their repayment for years of torture and abuse! Here, now, finally, was their chance to strike it rich, to become famous, if they played it right. They had one shot, and they weren’t about to waste it. 

The first order of business was to lock James in his cellar room, which Sponge quickly did, despite the boy’s pleading and protests. Then they met the flock of reporters at the gate.

They were pleasant and welcoming—something they could be quite well, actually, if they really wanted to be—despite seeing a few familiar and unwelcome faces in the crowd. They quickly discovered that they could charge as much money as they wanted, and people would pay; they could demand twice as much for cameras, and people would pay; they could charge extra for strollers or little kids or food, and the money would come pouring into their hands. Spiker and Sponge were practically gleeful as the cash came rolling in, laughing almost maniacally as their backyard filled with hundreds of people swarming to get a look at the peach.

Just in the lunchtime lull, when many local visitors were going home and before any of the media had showed up, Sponge stood with one hand resting on the gate and her head cocked at her sister. “Did you ever wonder  _ why  _ this happened?” she said softly. “I mean, that tree’s never had so much as a blossom, much less a peach, much less a  _ giant  _ one. Something had to have happened, right?”

Spiker pursed her lips and thought back. It did seem suspicious to her that James had been kneeling at the peach tree’s roots, looking as if he expected something surprising to happen. It was odd. It was very odd, very strange.

_ Hmm. _

As she turned her head to let the last visitor out, her gaze fell upon the small window at the top of James’ cellar room that peeked outside. Through the bars, she could see James’ small face; and his expression was nearly impossible to read. There was sadness there, yes, and longing to be outside, but there was also a slight superiority, as if he knew something his aunts didn’t, and a tiny droplet of confidence, as if he knew something was about to happen next.

As a sudden flood of reporters surged up the hill towards Spiker’s and Sponge’s house, all brandishing notebooks and pencils and contracts, Spiker made one last second of eye contact with James, her brow furrowed in concentration.

_ What do you know? _

***

“Well, we’ve had the peach tree for quite some time now, and it’s never actually given us any fruit before now,” Sponge said warmly, giving a bright smile at the nine or ten reporters who faced her and her sister, scribbling down notes on steno pads. “It was quite a shock, actually. At first it was just a normal-sized fruit, but it actually grew as we watched it. Neither of us had seen anything like it before.”

“Yes, it was completely unexpected,” Spiker put in. “We thought that tree had been dead for years.”

There was silence for a few seconds as the reporters finished jotting down notes. Then one of them raised his head. 

“And you don’t have any idea what caused this?”

“No, not whatsoever.”

And then, from behind Spiker, came a timid young voice. “I do.”

Spiker and Sponge spun to see James standing there, looking fearful but also determined. They reacted in shock—they  _ had  _ locked him up, hadn’t they?—but the reporters were already turning towards him.

“You do? And why, in your knowledge, did this happen?”

Before any more damage could be done, Spiker stepped in. “All right, that’s enough,” she said, still warm and friendly for the reporters. To them, she said, “This is just our nephew; he’s not quite right in the head. Gets these ideas that he’s in fantasy worlds sometimes… you don’t have to listen to him.”

“Been that way ever since his mother’s death,” Sponge put in, eager to be helpful.

Unfortunately, one of the reporters made a quick connection. “Oh, is this Lillian and Anthony Trotter’s son?” she said, smiling warmly at James. James perked up immediately, seeing a glimmer of hope.

“Yes,” he said, “and they wouldn’t have sent me to my aunts if they’d known—”

“James.” Sponge’s voice was firm. “Please be quiet; we have guests.”

Spiker looked at the boy. “Perhaps he can go read a book in his room?” she said, a pointed suggestion.

“I don’t have any—”

“Yes, that’s a good idea,” said Sponge with a forced smile, carrying James away. Spiker let out a breath of relief. Crisis averted. But she made a mental note to punish James for that escape attempt later.

As the day wound down, a helicopter from Hollywood landed a ways off, and a swarm of agents scurried up the hill to get Spiker and Sponge to sign a few quick contracts. The fine print was filled with lots of fancy words neither woman could understand, so they skipped that part and signed them quickly. All that mattered to them were the passages about money:

_ “…will be paid a sum of £200…”  _

_ “…will receive a compensation of £165 for their appearance on the program…”  _

_ “…will be paid a £100 flat fee for use of photographs and a 10% royalty on all copies sold…”  _

_ “…will be paid  £250 for allowing the peach to be photographed…” _

The list went on and on. And most of the contracts didn’t even require Spiker or Sponge to do anything besides allow the peach to be photographed. Why not! People would want to see it, and if they could be paid £250 or £2000 for just having the peach sitting in their backyard, then of course! Why not!

A Hollywood agent signed the two to a £350 deal for a documentary. Spiker and Sponge, who had become better at negotiating, got the man to give them 15% of all tickets sold to the documentary in theatres. A group of Broadway producers dropped hints about a possible musical about the peach; two men named Ben Pasek and Paul Justin (or something like that) were particularly interested. They agreed to pay £100, not even to do anything, just to hold their spot, guarantee their rights to the peach musical. And if they  _ did  _ make it into a play, well, then Spiker and Sponge would be paid even more!

The sun had long since set by the time the last agents, reporters, and sightseers had left. Spiker and Sponge were so gleeful by the time they were left alone that they couldn’t help but scream. They’d signed, what,  _ dozens,  _ maybe even  _ hundreds  _ of contracts, and they’d been paid flat fees in advance for some of them;  _ not to mention  _ all of the people who had paid simply to get in! Spiker and Sponge were laughing with exhilaration, and as soon as the last tourist (a very pushy woman with five little girls who just wouldn’t leave) had finally gone, they meant to scamper back to their kitchen and count their money.

But first they had to get James to clean up the yard. He’d been locked back in his room (which now had a secured deadbolt) and left alone for a few hours. Now Spiker and Sponge barged in and forced James to his feet.

“Get out there and clean the garden,” Spiker spat. “Today’s crowds left it awfully dirty. We’ll be busy counting our money.”

Eager for a chance to taunt James, Sponge turned to her sister. “How much money do you think we made today?”

Spiker laughed. “Why, hundreds of pounds, Sponge, hundreds! If not thousands! With just the money we got today, we’ve got to be in the top 20% of the entire nation! And what’s more, we’ll get tons more after those cameramen and photographers get that media and start writing books and making documentaries. We’re going to be so wealthy it’ll make your head spin!”

James looked up pleadingly; his words were barely a whisper. “Do you think we could go to the seashore? Or perhaps take a trip?”

Sponge looked down at him, laughing. “‘We’ aren’t doing anything, James.”

Mustering up all his courage, James protested: “But it was me that made the peach grow!”

Sponge laughed. “ _ You  _ couldn’t make my toenails grow!”

“But it  _ was  _ me!”

“Liar.”

“But—”

And suddenly Spiker saw a perfectly golden opportunity. Her mind flashed back to the recurring nightmare from the day before. And she recalled with perfect clarity the brutal words Lillian had flung at her like a devastating grenade:  _ Oh, Spiker, you lovely horrible idiot girl. You listen to me very, very carefully, okay? Raise your right hand and repeat after me. “I, Spiker Harrisburg, am a worthless, lying little girl. And nobody will ever be interested in anything I have to say. Not today, not tomorrow, not ever, ever, ever!” _

Spiker turned and looked James up and down. Then she smiled. 

“James, my dear, dear foolish boy,” she said slyly. Her voice was coated with honey: to an outsider, it would have seemed tantalizing and wonderful; to James, it sounded sickly sweet. He knew something was up. 

“I want you to raise your right hand,” Spiker continued, “and repeat after me. ‘I, James whatever Trotter—”

Seeing that nothing good could come from resistance, James meekly raised his right hand and echoed Spiker’s words: “I, James Henry Trotter…”

Spiker smiled sickeningly at James and continued: “‘—am a worthless, lying little boy. And nobody will ever be interested in anything I have to say. Not today, not tomorrow, not ever, ever, ever!’” She gave James a shove for good measure, and he stumbled, falling back on his knees. His eyes were dark, abandoned; he felt completely betrayed.

Spiker stared at him. “Now go clean the garden,” she whispered threateningly. And James scampered off to do as he was told.

Then Spiker and Sponge hurried to the kitchen, eager to count their money. The two sat at the table, stacking coins and notes into neat piles by value. It began to add up: £25, £50, £75… finally even £200, £300, £400. Spiker and Sponge were just laughing and laughing, their future finally, for  _ once _ , bright and optimistic; they felt they were finally reaping the fruits of their labors here. Literally.

Finally, at nearly one o’clock in the morning, Spiker and Sponge gathered their money and locked it up, then collapsed on their beds and almost immediately sank into a black, dreamless sleep. And when they woke, it was eight o’clock in the morning, and bright sunlight was streaming in through their windows, urging them to wake up. The sisters expected another group of reporters to show up—after all, several of the further-away news outlets had just now received word of the phenomenon—and they wanted to get out there and give interviews as quickly as possible. Plus a whole score of brand new tourists with pockets full of cash were beginning to arrive at the gate, too.

The two women hurriedly scrubbed their faces, put on new clothes, brushed their hair and pulled it back out of their faces, and rushed out to take their place ticket-collecting at the gate. They were so wrapped up in the incredibly fast-paced, busy work, that it wasn’t until the morning crowd had been let in that Sponge thought of James. 

“I wonder what became of the boy last night,” she said offhandedly. “He never did come back inside, did he?”

Spiker shrugged indifferently. “He probably fell down in the dark. Maybe broke his leg,” she answered.

“Or his neck!” laughed Sponge in a rather hopeful tone of voice. Spiker grinned. 

“Just wait till I’ve finished with him. First trying to escape, then trying to convince us  _ he  _ made the peach grow, then not coming back. Oh, when I’m through with him…” She laughed expectantly. 

And suddenly Spiker heard a snap and then a tremendous crash. Shocked and scared, she spun to suddenly see her and Sponge’s peach— _ their prize peach! _ —crashing through the fence enclosing the garden and thundering towards them. She gave a glottal cry—half-scream, half-yell—of terror, and then began sprinting out of the way, grabbing her sister’s hand and dragging her along. “Come on!  _ Come on! _ ”

And then the peach was almost on top of Spiker. Shoving Sponge hard out of the way, she gave a cry and dive-rolled to the side. She crashed through a clump of laurel bushes, whose branches whipped and cut her face, leaving droplets of blood beading. Breathing heavily, Spiker got herself to her knees, then her feet. A few feet away, Sponge was doing the same.

The two sisters flung their arms around each other, squeezing tightly in relief and panic. Then, as they began to calm down, they saw an extremely angry mob storming towards them. They were all pointing at the peach and yelling incomprehensible things, but it was clear what their anger was about. Another group was marching up the side of the hill, pummeling their fists in the air.

Spiker and Sponge took one look at each other and sprinted away. The mob chased after them, but the women were still rather athletic after years of having to be quick on their feet. They were almost literally flying over the ground, and their pursuers were slow and clumsy, as mobs usually are. So Spiker and Sponge managed to get away, and they hid themselves in an alleyway behind a building to assess their situation.

First of all, the entire town was in chaos. The peach had barrelled through the city, smashing houses and demolishing buildings. The gates of a chocolate factory had been completely devastated, and liquid chocolate was pouring into the street. The peach itself was long-gone, but it left a very visible trail of destruction.

Also very visible was the now much larger mob frantically searching for Spiker and Sponge. People whose houses had been wrecked or who had been injured by the peach were now very upset and yelling at the top of their lungs. Sponge felt her stomach twist. This was not what was supposed to happen! They were supposed to be rich and famous! This was their lucky break! So where had it gone wrong?

She became aware of Spiker urgently tugging her sleeve and crying her name. Sponge’s head snapped towards her sister, who was staring around urgently. The twins turned to face each other, both nervous.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” Spiker said quickly, under her breath. 

Sponge nodded. “We should leave the country,” she agreed, in the same tone. “People are really,  _ really  _ furious.”

Spiker closed her eyes and nodded too, harried. She began to look around; and then her eyes caught on a man’s, standing on the deck of a cruise ship docked in the port. Sponge followed her sister’s gaze; then, with a nod of agreement, the two women sprinted over to the dock and asked the porter where the nearest ship was heading towards.

“First boat out’s goin’ to America,” he informed them. “That’ll be  £100 each, if you don’t mind.”

They’d had to leave most of their money behind, but Spiker and Sponge managed to find enough in their pockets to scrape together £150. Then they convinced the rather thick-in-the-head porter that they only wanted one ticket, and through some sleight of hand, deception, and trickery, both women snuck on. They’d only had to pay £100, leaving them £50 in reserve—hopefully enough to get their new life started right.

In ten minutes, both women were on the lower deck of the  _ Jewel of the Sea _ , lounging in deck chairs, safely out of view of anyone on the street. And five minutes after that, the  _ Jewel of the Sea  _ was pulling out of port and steaming away towards a new, hopefully safer life.

Spiker gave a smile at the sight of the English coastline receding in the distance. “America,” she smiled. “The land of the brave and the home of the free!” Then, catching her sister’s glance, she added: “Or something like that.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the record, I will be out of state on a school trip for the next week-and-a-half-ish and will not be able to work on this piece until I return. However, I hope to have another chapter posted by the 18th (and the 25th at the latest).


	11. One Name, One Meaning: One Fate

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope this chapter works... ;)

The light was sparkling on the bright blue surface of the ocean early the next morning when Sponge woke up. For a second, she was in a state of panic and shock, completely unaware of where she was, in a small, two-bed cabin on the lower deck of the  _ Jewel of the Sea _ . And then suddenly it all came flooding back, and it made her jump.

“Spiker!” Her voice was shrill, tense. When her sister didn’t answer immediately, she repeated it, louder:  _ “Spiker!” _

Sponge’s twin sister woke with a start, sitting up in shock in the bed beside her. The panic in Spiker’s voice had her alert in a moment. There had been times in the past when that panic had meant something, when a second’s delay could mean intense pain or punishment or a missed opportunity, when her sister’s scream had meant she had to sprint or dive or dodge.

“What?” Spiker’s heart was pounding; her entire body seemed electrified with adrenaline. “What is it, what’s up? What’s wrong?”

Staring into her sister’s eyes, Sponge felt herself calm. She felt her shoulders physically relax; and it felt like morphine had been pumped into her brain, sending a calm, serene feeling through her mind. It was okay. Her sister was here. While her sister was here, she wasn’t alone, and when she wasn’t alone, she was safe. It was when she was alone that the monsters crept in, mostly during the night.

_ The monsters. _

Sponge, suddenly tense again, ran a hand through her hair. Spiker, always overprotective, noticed immediately. She crossed to her sister and put a hand around her neck.

“What’s up?” Spiker murmured softly, her brow furrowed, looking concernedly at her sister. She hated to see Sponge in distress. It was worse to see Sponge sad than to see her in pain. Pain would always pass.

Sponge sat down heavily on her bed and dropped her head into her hands. Her words came quickly. “Oh my God, Spiker, what on earth are we going to do? Do you even have any idea what just happened? We’re on a ship to an entirely new continent with £50. That’s it— _ £50.  _ What can we possibly do? Where will we sleep, what will we eat, who can we trust—oh God, Spiker, how will we survive?”

Spiker took a few seconds’ pause. She reached over and took her sister’s left hand, which was sitting balled on her knee; she gently massaged it until Sponge’s fist unclenched. Only then, when Sponge had let her body relax, did Spiker speak.

“We’ll survive the same way we always have,” she said quietly. “We’ll be resourceful. We’ll be smart. We won’t be afraid to buy a dingy little house from people who laugh at us, and then we’ll do what we need to do, we’ll show them up, and we’ll prosper. What, seven, eight years ago, Sponge, we were on our own with no money; not even a shilling. And we survived. By the time four years had passed we were some of the most respected vendors in the market. That can happen again. It  _ will  _ happen again. And as for trust; we’ll trust each other, and  _ only  _ each other. The only person in the entire world who has earned my complete, undenying trust is sitting right next to me. Nobody else has convinced me they’re trustworthy. And at the rate we’re going, I don’t think anybody ever will.”

“I mean…” Sponge started to speak, then trailed off, breathing heavily. “I don’t know what it is, Spiker. Last night I had so many nightmares, more than I’ve ever had, worse than I’ve ever had since—since Mr. O’Hara. I don’t know why… And now this morning I’m thinking about Mr. O’Hara more, and Sandra, and Lillian, and I’m not angry, I’m scared. I have no idea why, and it’s torturing me. It’s terrifying me.”

Spiker looked at her. “Me too,” she said quietly. “Those memories are coming back. And I think what it is…  do you realize this is the first time since we were seventeen that we’ve slept somewhere other than our little cottage? The first time? And so it’s unfamiliar and we’re tense, and it’s a bit disorienting too, and so that is making us feel just creeped out and nervous. And so our minds are more vulnerable and the… the bad stuff starts to sneak in.”

Sponge looked at her sister. “You’re so good at analyzing people,” she said quietly. “You could’ve been a psychologist. You would’ve been great at it.”

Spiker laughed bitterly. “Yeah, that was never going to happen.”

“It  _ could have _ , though!” Sponge cried out. “If you’d been given the chance—! If—not even if people had listened to you! If people had left you alone to develop your talents, you could’ve been something great! You have so much potential bottled up inside—”

But Spiker was shaking her head. “I  _ had  _ potential,” she corrected quietly. “But that was stolen. It’s gone now.” She closed her eyes in agony for a second; but then, when she reopened them, they were blazing with fire. “But let’s not worry about that,” she said. “Let’s not worry about what could have been, because it’s not. Let’s focus on here, and now, and the future. And in the future, we can pretty much do whatever we want. Which is… what, exactly? What do  _ you  _ want our future to hold?”

Sponge’s eyes glowed slightly. “I did like gardening,” she admitted. “Maybe we can get a garden plot.”

Spiker nodded. “Yeah, that was always fun. And we got to be creative; problems would show up and we’d fix them.”

“And we spent time together outside. We were working, but we also got to be together.”

Spiker smiled. “We’ll get a garden. It’s a deal.”

“And now,” Sponge said brightly, “we should go up and see the ocean!”

Spiker’s smile widened with excitement. “Oh, yes!” she enthused. “England should be nearly invisible by now. Can you imagine what it must look like— _ feel  _ like—to be out in the open ocean, completely surrounded by water?”

Sponge grinned. “I imagine we’re about to find out.”

***

“Look, Mama!” The little girl’s crisp shout, and her subsequent giggle, rent the air, disturbing the peaceful tranquility of the early-morning that Spiker and Sponge had been enjoying on their second morning on the  _ Jewel of the Sea _ . The girl, with dual bright blond yet messy ponytails, scampered behind the two women and scurried towards the ship’s side rail. Her bright blue eyes were shining with eagerness as she clambered up on the rail, her feet leaving the ground. Her waist was now even with the top bar of the railing; her heels were resting on the third bar from the floor. “Look, look!” the girl repeated, pointing now. “ _ Whales _ !”

Following the girl’s small finger, Spiker and Sponge could indeed see the telltale shapes of humpback whales coming up for air. The two sisters both smiled slightly—seeing the completely untamed ocean wildlife was one of the best parts of their trip. But then the girl’s mother strode over.

“Nice spotting!” she enthused. And then she said: “Do you know what kinds of whales those are, Sandra?”

Sponge felt her hands tense on the rail as her blood became colder than ice. Next to her, Spiker’s entire body froze and she began to shake.

_ Sandra. _

Images came flooding into Spiker’s mind. Her mother standing over her and her sister, screaming into their dirty nine-year-old faces framed by matted, unkempt brown hair. That same woman swinging a massive cast-iron pan at her sister’s head as she flung herself down to avoid the blow. The woman, frowning as her missile missed the girl’s head, raising the pan and bringing it down hard on the Sponge’s back. The girl screaming, her mouth open and her teeth bared in absolute white-hot agony. That same girl two years later, sitting with her back against the wall, arms around knees, head tucked into her lap, the very picture of despair. Again the girl, and again, and again, crying, screaming, pleading, begging, whispering, pounding the ground in fury. Never laughing. Never even smiling.

_ Sandra. _

Similar moments were floating through Sponge’s head. The memories she saw and heard were more disjointed; less clear-cut. She heard screams. She heard shouts. She heard agonized cries tearing through the air. She heard her sister pleading, and saw her on her knees in front of her mother, tears streaming down her cheeks, begging to be cut a little bit of slack for not finishing the mile-high pile of housework she’d been assigned. And then when it became clear she wasn’t going to get that, begging for something else: okay, it’s okay, hurt me, beat me, torture me, please; but then give me something to eat. Please. And then Sponge saw her mother kick Spiker away like she was nothing and storm out of the room. That memory faded, and Sponge saw others: the two of them, the two sisters, right next to each other, cowering away from their mother’s face, twisted with irrational fury; on their knees taking a brutal beating, tears in their eyes, but still hand in hand, with their fingers tightly interlocked; trying to block out the sound of their mother’s threats to kill them: to send a knife through their head, to starve them, to leave them alone with a neighbor’s packs of massive dogs who hadn’t eaten in a week. 

_ Sandra. _

That was who had done all of this. That was who had caused all of Spiker’s and Sponge’s wretched lives,  _ made  _ them horrible, stolen from them every opportunity they ever could have had.

_ Sandra. _

And the eager little girl standing on the rail next to them, crying out “Humpback whales!”, correctly identifying the species in response to her own loving mother’s question, was named Sandra too.

The minute that word, that name, was spoken, all rationality left Spiker’s and Sponge’s minds. Sandra meant pain. And so Sandra needed to be dealt with.

The little girl Sandra’s mother was just a few feet away. And so Spiker edged over, pretended to eagerly follow the little girl’s pointed finger, and, with a slight, very accidental-looking shove, pushed the girl so she fell over the rain and tumbled, screaming, through the air, tumbling down towards the ocean.

The overwhelming desire, the resolve, the  _ need  _ to do that was beyond words, beyond comprehension. In Spiker’s and Sponge’s brains, the rationality overrun by hatred and fear, it seemed the only possible option. They needed to get any remnant, any horrible trace of their abusive childhood, out of their minds, out of their faces, completely out of their lives. This little girl who sported the dreadful, terrible, agonizing name of the twins’ mother had to leave. She had to disappear. She was connected to a history of torture and pain, and she couldn’t be allowed to stay. Her presence would only reinstate the women’s lives to what they had been (mentally, at least). That would be pure horror. And so this girl needed to go. She needed to be dealt with. She needed to be gone. Another Sandra, even if their was no biological relationship, could never be allowed to enter Spiker’s or Sponge’s life again. That pain could not be borne. So this little Sandra couldn’t be allowed to survive.

And now she wouldn’t. The little girl’s body splashed into the ocean far below, and the ship, ignorant of its lost passenger, continued speeding forward.

“ _ Sandra _ !” the girl’s mother yelled. And instantly Spiker and Sponge, snapped back to the present, were acting. They had learned to act unbelievably well after their rough childhood; they could conceal their emotions and replace them with whatever emotions they thought their tormentor would like to see, whatever emotions would save them from pain. And now  they were putting those talents to use. They crowded with little Sandra’s mother at the rail, crying out and peering down at the dark ocean. Spiker let a few tears come into her eyes as she yelled: “I didn’t mean to, oh, I didn’t mean to at all, oh God, what have I done?” Sandra’s mother was screaming her head off, throwing herself against the rail; porters and crew members were sprinting over, trying to figure out what had happened. A few immediately sprinted off towards the ship’s poop deck and grabbed the life preserver, tossing it off the end. But the  _ Jewel of the Sea _ was a steamship, and steamships move quickly. By the time anything could be done, the spot where Sandra had fallen was far behind.

The captain was now rushing on deck too, having left one of his crew members, Second Officer Baker, in charge of the wheel. He was frantic, trying to contact the boiler rooms; but eventually he had to deliver the truth.

“It takes a long time to turn a ship like the  _ Jewel of the Sea _ around,” he said slowly to little Sandra’s mother. “By the time we could turn around, it would be nearly impossible to navigate back to the exact spot where your daughter fell in.” Then he paused. “Can she swim?”

“No!” the girl’s mother cried out desperately. “She can’t swim! She’s  _ six _ !”

The captain’s face changed. Grief flashed in his eyes and his features crumpled. He closed his eyes to compose himself; and when he opened them, he could barely force out: “Then… I’m sorry. She’s gone.”

Little Sandra’s mother’s anger was a small price to pay for little Sandra’s death. Besides, the five passengers who’d been on the deck swore it was an accident (a sentiment which with Spiker and Sponge hastily agreed) and neither woman could be prosecuted for any role in little Sandra’s death. It was an immensely satisfying feeling.

Spiker and Sponge spent the rest of the day in the cabin, their blissful morning ruined by acidic fury and the torture of memories they thought they’d buried. But they’d dealt with little Sandra, and put some of their mind at rest as they felt they’d hurt older Sandra too, and so that made it a good day.

***

_ Magic works in weird ways, and crocodile tongues are one of the strangest of the strange. Oftentimes crocodile tongues seem to have a mind of their own when it comes to what they do. Oddly, they’ll work in very different ways depending on what’s needed of them. They will do anything and everything they need to do to come to somebody’s aid in any given circumstances. And they seem to have a soft spot for children. _

_ When James spilled the bag of crocodile tongues that fateful morning, he thought all of them had scampered off. But they hadn’t. One tiny little glowing green tongue had waited loyally for James to find it. When Spiker and Sponge came, though, it hid, and James never did come back and discover the little tongue. And this tiny little green piece of magic had followed James, and it had burrowed into the soft skin of the peach when James did. It intended to follow him all the way to America, as a safeguard, as a reassurance, in case it was ever called upon to help James. _

_ But halfway through the ocean, this tongue sensed that it was needed. And it knew that James was as safe as he could be. So the little tongue hopped off the peach and skipped a few miles over the water until it found the person who needed it. The tongue analyzed the situation quickly—it was a rather desperate one—and then burrowed its way into the ear of the humpback whale in front of it. _

_ The whale could now speak Human. _

_ There was a human nearby that was crying out.  _ Help, help! _ , it was saying. _

What is wrong? _ the whale said in its head. The little human nearby heard him. _

I’m drowning! _ the voice said.  _ I’m trapped in the ocean and I can’t swim! Help me!

_ The whale frowned. The human was only very little, and it couldn’t swim. The whale couldn’t just leave it to drown. _

Okay _ , the whale said.  _ I will help you. I will swim you to land. My friends will help too.

_ True to his word, the humpback whale lifted the little human out of the water on his back, and he swum near the surface of the ocean so the human’s head stayed above water for hours. And when he got tired, another whale took the little human, and then another, and another. None of these whales could talk to the human, but the previous whales had told them what they needed to do. The first whale was long gone by the time an exhausted humpback dropped the human off at the water’s edge near a beach, but his sentiment was not. The human had made it safely to land. _

_ Crocodile tongues don’t leave anyone in distress, much less a little six-year-old who’s been pushed off the edge of a ship thousands of miles from land. They lend a hand. They don’t solve all problems, but they can help you get to a point where you can solve your own. _

_ Sandra Brogan was still alone in a new country, but she was smart and brave. And the  _ Jewel of the Sea _ had a phone onboard.  _

_ Never doubt where a little magic can take you. _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I couldn't just let her die, could I?!


	12. The Definition of Love

All of the passengers knew that little Sandra’s death had been an accident; they believed it wholeheartedly. And although they didn’t blame Spiker and Sponge for the little girl’s demise, they weren’t exactly quick to make friends with them either. Perfect actresses, the twins kept up the pretense when they were around others. But when they were alone in their cabin, left alone with nobody but each other, they positively gloated. There was nothing but laughter as they remembered the little blond girl’s face, frozen in horror and fear as she tumbled towards the ocean.

And she deserved every bit of it.

Because her name was Sandra.

The pain that she’d gone through in the last moments of her life, Spiker and Sponge thought, was only a smidge of what they’d suffered at her namesake’s hands. It could barely even compare. She unquestionably deserved to suffer that way; but Spiker and Sponge had taken much worse abuse themselves.

That next morning, Sponge took a shower onboard the  _ Jewel of the Sea _ —a modern convenience that had just been added to several trans-Atlantic ships. When she pulled off her dress and dropped it heavily to the floor, a few sad bills floated gently out of the pockets; bills and something else.

At first Sponge didn’t realize that the last piece of paper that had drifted, rather pathetically, out of her pocket as she’d dropped the dress wasn’t a pound note. But the shape was all wrong, it was obvious once you’d gotten the first look; and the color was off too. Suspicious now, Sponge dropped to her knees to examine the paper.

The sheet of paper was yellowing slightly, and water-stained; by the look of it, with tears. Sponge just stared at it for a second, her mouth slightly open and her brow furrowed.

_ This must’ve gotten tucked in my pocket… but when? How? _

The paper was a photograph; a photograph of what looked like a sweet little family. A young couple was looking adoringly at each other, faces frozen in a delighted laugh. The woman was holding a toddler in her arms; the child’s father was laughing and ruffling the little boy’s bright blond curls. The boy’s arms were wrapped protectively around his mother’s neck; he was looking up adoringly into his father’s jovial face.

Sponge recognized the boy immediately. From the look of the picture, he was about two, only a few years younger than when she’d met him from the first time. But even without James’ face, she’d have known the family immediately, because Lillian’s face could not be overlooked, could not be forgotten. Sponge felt her mouth press into a thin line as she felt the wispy tendrils of the dreamland, of the nightmare that haunted her creep back into her mind. She squeezed her eyes shut to block out the tears, willing herself not to break down…

With one swift, decisive movement, Sponge tore the photograph in half, then put the pieces on top of one another and ripped it in two again. Over and over and over, until the floor was littered with dozens of scraps of paper, all mixed up and impossible to put back together. Sponge ran a hand through her matted hair, took a deep breath to calm herself, then forced herself to put the photograph out of her mind and stepped into the warm shower, letting the steam envelop her and trying with all her might to think of other things.

***

Forty minutes later, Spiker and Sponge were sitting side-by-side on two deck chairs overlooking the ocean, eating a light breakfast they’d ordered from the ship’s onboard cafe. The sun was just beginning to rise, and it was casting the entire ocean in a serene, golden light. The western half of the sky was still dotted here and there with stars, while the eastern edge was full of pink and orange. It was a beautiful sight to behold.

“I’ve always liked sunrises,” Sponge murmured as the sun started to rise above the ocean off in the distance. “They’re… hopeful.”

Spiker just looked at her sister’s face for a minute, illuminated in the glow of the golden rays, and smiled. She closed her eyes slightly, savoring the moment. “That’s a good word for it,” she concurred quietly. “Hopeful.”

The sisters locked gazes for a second, and it was one of the first peaceful moments they’d shared in a long time, one of the first truly serene gazes that wasn’t undermined by cruel manipulation, or worry, or fear, or anticipation. It was truly tranquil, and it was a nice change, for once.

Spiker and Sponge stayed there watching the ocean for a long while. Before they knew it, the sky was a bright blue, and the deck had begun to come to life. Many of the younger passengers—there were quite a few of them—were wildly energetic and beyond excited for a new day of exploration and excitement on the ship.

The youngest ones definitely had the most energy—and it was, indeed, one of the children who spotted the phenomenon first. He’d been playing with one of his younger friends when he saw it, froze, and stumbled over to the rail to get a better look, fists clutching the railing so he didn’t fall from shock. The boy, face still a mask of shock, stood, pointing out into the frothy waves, calling out: “Look; look! Mama, it’s—it’s— _ Mama _ , it’s a giant peach!”

The boy’s mother turned, in exasperation, to hush him. But Spiker and Sponge immediately spun around to look. They didn’t believe for a second that the boy was lying, or making up a story, or simply mistaken. It was too great a coincidence. He had to be telling the truth.

As Spiker and Sponge crossed hurriedly to the other rail, peering into the ocean despite the dazzling glare of the sun. And sure enough, there, bobbing out in the middle of the ocean, was an unmistakable giant peach. 

And not only that, but there were clearly people standing on the peach. Six adults, it looked like, their bodies weirdly distorted by what must have been the strange angle of the sun; and one little boy.

Instinct told Spiker and Sponge immediately who the child was. Not only was he physically instantly recognizable, a giant peach and some other little boy was far too unlikely to be possible.

As the rest of the cruise ship’s passengers began to crowd around in shock and surprise, all with their own theories about what the mysterious object floating in the ocean was, Spiker and Sponge just continued to stare, a million emotions churning about inside them: wonder, awe, bewilderment, hate, fury, a vow to get revenge. Somehow they were going to get their wonder-peach back, their peach and their nephew both, and the world was  _ not  _ going to cheat them out of another opportunity. That had happened far too often.

As the commotion increased, though, and the theories tossed around about just what the unknown object was began to get wilder and wilder, Spiker and Sponge found that they just couldn’t tear their eyes from the sight before them. They had to watch, had to keep their eyes feasting on the scene unfolding in front of them, and try to puzzle out what was going on.

The people on top of the peach were crowding on one edge, apparently peering out into the water. One of the taller adults bent down to point something out to James, who shook his head slowly with an obvious air of confusion. The same adult bent down to lift James up to see better; James nodded eagerly then, smiling and wrapping one of his arms around the adult. Yet another of the older passengers on the peach reached out to smooth James’ unruly hair, tossed about in the crisp sea breeze; when she was done, she caressed James’ cheek and then let her hand rest on James’ shoulder. James turned and gave her a long, adoring look.

Sponge was staring at the group, her face white. She’d sworn she wouldn’t think about it… but the way that one adult was holding her nephew, the way the other had stroked his cheek, had kept a comforting hand on his shoulder… it reminded her of the photograph she’d found in her pocket that morning. The photo of a younger James with his parents. Before… well, before everything. 

Sponge just kept gazing endlessly at the peach—or, more accurately, at its passengers. When James thought of a family, was this what came to mind? Somebody speaking gently to him, lifting him up so he could see, smoothing his hair, stroking his cheek? Was this what he longed for during the nights when she could hear him crying himself to sleep? Was it his parents, their figures, their physical shape and presence that he wanted, or was it something more abstract? Something as simple as a kind word, a hint of concern? Was this what James desired more than anything else in the world? Was this what he would define as a family; as love?

_ How would  _ I  _ define a family? How would I define love? _

Staring at her nephew, who’d been let down gently by the taller adult, Sponge felt her forehead tense in uncertainty. She didn’t even know what she’d say a family truly was. Family was… family was somebody who you could trust when you’re running for your life, trying to escape the hideous, torturous clutches of a man you’ve been sold to by your own family. But  _ not  _ your family—at least not in spirit. Biologically yes, but family had to be more than just blood—

Sponge groaned slightly and dropped her head so it rested on the cold metal rail of the ship. She’d thought herself into a corner here; and anyways, logic had never been her strong suit. Oh, why was life so  _ complicated _ ? Why was everything so complicated?

“Sponge. Sponge!  _ Sponge! _ ”

Sponge was wrenched from her mentally-distant stupor with a slight shock. “Sorry?” she said distractedly. “What did you say?”

Her sister was waving a hand back and forth in front of her eyes. “I  _ said _ , we’ve got to do something, Sponge!”

“Yeah.” Sponge’s words were slightly slurred; her mind was still far away. “We do.”

“James is there of his own free will,” Spiker said tersely, clutching the beam; Sponge could practically hear the gears in her head whirring. “It’s too much of a coincidence. Nobody forced him to be there, nobody kidnapped him.”

Sponge raised her eyebrows. “You don’t think so? Because there are six adults on that peach, and they would be more than capable of overpowering him.”

Spiker shook her head. “I think he’s there because he wants to be there. Because he thinks it’s an escape.” She spun her head around and snapped her fingers authoritatively; a young seaman hurried over.

“So we should tell somebody, right? A porter or someone?”

But Spiker was shaking her head. “No,” she said, in a hushed tone. “No, we shouldn’t, and here’s why. We don’t want to get wrapped up in the middle of all this. What if we say we know what’s going on, and the captain or somebody starts to panic and wants us to talk to a general of the army or something? No, here’s what we do. We lie low. We’re cautious and we’re observant, and we think, and we watch. We don’t say anything suspicious. Then, when we get to New York, we get off the boat quickly and find the peach. Until then—we can’t do anything that would single us out, at all. Okay?”

Sponge nodded slowly. “Okay then.”

The sisters turned their ears back to the crowd on the ship’s rail. Currently there was a man in a dark blue suit shouting about how the peach was a bomb, and he knew because he used to be a technician for the army, and how who knew when it was going to detonate! Spiker stifled a laugh.

A porter, who introduced himself as Nathaniel Cripps, was out on the deck, telling everybody he’d be sure to tell the captain, Mr. Frederick Carlsberg, to get to New York as soon as possible. According to the blue-suited man, who was now slightly hysterical, the bomb appeared to be on course to go to New York, too; the porter licked his lips nervously and said he’d make the captain aware. The man in the suit started shouting that they should go  _ away  _ from New York; a very small number of very loud people started agreeing with him; and the entire deck descended into a chaotic shouting match.

Spiker rolled her eyes. “Let’s get back to the cabin before this turns into a fistfight,” she intoned. “Seems quite likely at the moment.”

Sponge laughed. “Quite,” she agreed, grinning. Then she paused. “Besides, we have a bit of a discussion to have—about once we get James back.”

Spiker smiled broadly. “Ah, yes,” she said sweetly, and Sponge shivered. “We do have to talk about that, indeed.”

***

Sponge was half sitting up, half lying down on her bed, her head resting on the headboard and her lower back and legs stretched out across the mattress. “But what does ‘custody’ even mean?”

Spiker shook her head and wrung her hands together. “I don’t know the exact wording, but basically it means we have… we’re his official guardians in the eyes of the government, and so we essentially get to just take him. He’s our responsibility under the law, and so he’s in our power.”

Sponge stared at her sister. “How did you know that?”

Spiker shrugged and looked away. “Lillian said something about—about Sandra having official custody of us when I was upset one night and just screaming at her. She said that’s why we would—why we would never be able to escape her.” Spiker pressed her palms against her eyes. “Oh God, I’ve got to get these memories to stay out of my head.”

Sponge nodded sympathetically. “Being away from home only encourages the nightmares to set in.” And Spiker nodded too. But then she shook herself.

“All right, so we can take James and nobody is going to challenge us. We’re his guardians. And you know we can act, we can convince people beyond a doubt that we’re going to treat him just the way they think he should be treated. But, the thing is, if we’re in a big city, we’ll have to keep him hidden more carefully. People are very over-observant when it comes to this kind of thing.”

“Wish they’d been over-observant when it came to  _ us _ .”

“But that was a smaller town, and it was England. Americans are nosy.”

Sponge laughed out loud at that. “Or so you say. You’ve never actually met one.”

Spiker smiled. “Just trust me on this one.”

Sponge grinned and went back to the earlier discussion. “But wouldn’t it be better if we could find a small town? It would be easier to start with nothing, it seems like, than in a big city.”

“I agree,” Spiker said slowly, nodding thoughtfully. “Although it might be a challenge physically getting there in a number of ways.”

Sponge shrugged. “We’ll find out when we get there. But a small town would be optimal.”

There was silence for a few moments as the two sisters sat in companionable silence. Then Spiker looked over at her sister. “James is not going to be happy about coming back with us.”

Sponge burst into rueful, sardonic laughter. “Ha! And we care because… why, exactly?”

“Fair point! But he might put up a fuss.”

“So we’ll slap him and we’ll drag him and we’ll do what it takes until we can get him where we want him.”

Spiker paused for a moment. “Does it ever occur to you that really, he’s just a little boy? Looking at—looking at him this afternoon on the peach, he looked different than he’s ever looked to me before. Just like any other kid. Separate from  _ us _ . Just a normal… what, now… ten-year-old?”

Sponge was staring at her like she’d gone mad. “Spiker,” she said quietly. “‘Just a little boy’? Think of who his  _ mother  _ is! Think of what that horrible Lillian Trotter has done to us, and then ask yourself if her son deserves to be thought of with any mercy, at all deserves to be considered ‘just like any other kid’. Like a ‘normal ten-year-old’. Well, you know what? He’s not just a normal ten-year-old, Spiker, and he never will be! He refuses to accept what his mother has done, and that makes him just as bad as her, because he turned a blind eye to the awful abuse that we went through. He doesn’t care. He’s Lillian Trotter’s son, what else would you expect?” Sponge’s face was flushed bright red now. “He is  _ not  _ just a normal kid. And he will  _ never  _ be just a normal kid.  _ Never.  _ So stop… stop trying to make him seem remotely like that. He doesn’t deserve your pity; don’t let him trick you into thinking that he does.”

She paused, weating furiously. “Do you remember that one awful day,” she said dangerously, her voice trembling, “when Sandra and Lillian yelled at you for literally an hour straight? When they told you that you were worthless and stupid and unloved? When they told you I’d betrayed you, when they made you feel completely alone in the world? Remember when Lillian—damn her and her lies!—told you that I was only pretending to love you? Do you remember that, Spiker? Because now you’re trying to convince me to be sympathetic to that awful woman’s son. Now you’re trying to convince me to forget all of that—what she did to you, and what she did to me! What if I told you I wanted you to forgive the son of the woman who burned me with boiling water, who starved me for a week and forced me to watch her eat? What would you say then, Spiker?”

Spiker was shaking now. “I’d say never in a million years. God, Sponge, what was I thinking? What Lillian did to you—how can I ever—oh God, you’re so right. I can’t forgive her. Sympathy for her son is sympathy for her, isn’t it; and she does not deserve sympathy for what she’s done. Of  _ course  _ she doesn’t.” Spiker shuddered, awful images flashing through her mind. “God, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I don’t—of course I didn’t mean that, about James. Of course not. I’m so sorry. I was so wrong.”

***

Spiker and Sponge truly had thought they’d seen the sight of their life, watching a giant peach float like a catamaran in the middle of the ocean, but it turned out that wasn’t half of it. When they went back up on deck at 6:30 that night, the entire population of the cruise ship was crowding at one rail and crying out in wonder. Spiker and Sponge looked at each other with concern, wary, but strode over to the rail just the same.

The giant peach was still in view. But now it was steadily rising into the air.

_ The peach was flying. _

The same man from the previous day, who was now dressed immaculately in a crisp purple suit, was giving a lecture to the rest of the passengers. “It undoubtedly has a program which allows it to sense its location,” he said, “and it lifts into the air once it’s within a certain distance of its target.” He pursed his lips. “It’s likely flying now and preparing to drop on America!”

A little girl, the sunlight glinting on her black curls, was tugging on the man’s sleeve. “But, Papa—” she was protesting, looking across the sea. The man ignored her. The girl, staring nervously out over the water, had her eyes fixed on something above the peach. “Something’s pulling the peach!” she insisted, her voice tense and worried.

The man slowly bent down, eye-to-eye with the girl. “Kajita,” he said quietly, pronouncing the J like a Y:  _ Ky-ee-tuh. _ “That is not a giant peach. It is a bomb. You heard the captain say that. And nothing is pulling it. It’s mechanical. It has a motor; it flies itself. So please keep quiet. You’re seven, you don’t understand. Leave it to the adults.” Then the man—Kajita’s father—brushed off his hands and stood back up. “From the trajectory it’s flying at, it appears that the bomb will hit New York City!” he cried out. There was a roar of anger, fear, and panic from the onlookers.

Sponge looked sideways at her sister, sighed, and rolled her eyes. Ironic, somehow, that the little girl had been the only one who could see the truth. Adults so often believed it was the other way around, much of the time wrongly. Spiker, too, found it rather odd, considering that she could see plainly that something—and it looked like a flock of seagulls—was pulling the peach, keeping it in the air. Spiker was not about to take a wild guess on how the group of adults had managed to get a flock of seagulls to lift their peach, but she could tell that that’s what had happened.

Back in their own cabin that night, Spiker and Sponge had a quick, quiet discussion, making plans for their arrival in New York the following day. It was 1962, and there was no way to contact the mainland conveniently from the ship, so all of New York remained blissfully unaware about the peach-“bomb”. Spiker and Sponge knew they had to hurry to it if it landed, and if it didn’t, follow it until it did. They couldn’t let James escape.

Oh no, Spiker and Sponge could not afford to let the little boy slip through their clutches. And they absolutely would not.

***

_ That night, when Spiker went to sleep, the nightmare came back. This time it felt more real than ever. She could feel the ropes binding her to the chair cutting into her skin felt the weight of the kitchen knife, heavy in her hands; her face felt wet with tears. Spiker, slumped in the corner, looked more dead than ever before; the floor around her was sticky and covered in bright red blood. Sandra’s and Lillian’s laughs seemed crueler and more vindictive than ever before. _

_ But the most surprising part about the nightmare was that, just near the end, after she’d flung those few last awful words at Spiker, Lillian started to morph into James. And suddenly James was standing next to Sponge, at eleven years old about the same height standing as she was sitting. He just stood there watching her as she struggled against the bonds; then he quietly said, “That’s not going to work.” _

_ Spiker spun towards him, her body still electrified with the terror and fury associated with her sister’s death. “What would you know about it, you nasty little cretin?” she screamed through sobs, still throwing herself against the ropes.  _

_ At first James looked utterly destroyed by her insult. His bright blue eyes darkened with pain and despair; his face broke, and tears beaded in his eyes. He spun and began to run away from his aunt. But then, after only a few seconds, he stopped. _

_ “No,” James said, back still towards her. He turned around slowly, his voice calm and cold. “You can’t control me anymore.” _

_ “What are you talking about? You are  _ ours _ , you’re mine and Sponge’s, James; you belong completely to us. We are your official guardians, and we can do  _ whatever  _ we want with you. And in case you’re too stupid to figure that out, that means you cannot escape us, James. Never; not in a million years. You just remember: you can run, and you can hide, but me and Spiker are the only family you’ve got. And that means we decide what to do with you.” _

_ James just stared at her, not reacting, and Spiker began to feel a little unnerved by the force of his bright blue gaze. After a while, she looked away. _

_ “See?” James said quietly. “You have no power over me.” _

_ Suddenly, though, the bonds holding Spiker snapped for no apparent reason. Spiker jumped up, still holding the bloody knife. James was caught off-guard; he began backing away and gave a cry of fright. Good;  _ that  _ was more like it,  _ that  _ was the reaction she liked to see. Spiker had the undeniable physical advantage, and she threw James against the wall, holding the knife in his face. _

_ “You can run,” she repeated, tracing the blade across his right cheek.  _

_ “You can hide.” Down and across his neck, leaving a trail of blood behind. _

_ “But  _ we’re  _ the only family you’ve got.” Up across his left cheek now.  _

_ Then she released her hold on James and shoved him across the room. James scrambled out of the door, fear in his gaze; but as he left, he shouted back across the room: “I told you! You can’t control me!” _

In his bed inside the peach, and in her cabin belowdecks on the  _ Jewel of the Sea _ , James Henry Trotter and Spiker Harrisburg woke up as one, sitting bolt upright with identical cries of shock and fear. At once there were people by both of their sides: the Grasshopper, Mrs. Ladybug, and Miss Spider with James; and Spiker’s beloved, trusted sister with her. There were soft touches, gentle hands, sips of water and bits of food. But the response wasn’t exactly the same.

As James, still trembling, let himself sink into her arms, Mrs. Ladybug whispered, “Don’t worry; it’s okay. We won’t let them hurt you ever again.”

As Spiker released the iron grip on her body and let herself relax against her sister, Sponge stroked her hair soothingly and whispered, “Don’t worry; it’s okay. We’ll get back at him.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For those of you re-reading this after edits: I feel this version of the story (minus Spiker’s very farfetched story) works better and is a lot cleaner, and the transition into the next chapter feels more comfortable too. What do you guys think?


	13. In the City of Dreams

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A few notes on this chapter: 
> 
> 1) The book describes the Centipede as a “rascal,” as opposed to in the musical, where he is more pessimistic and angry. I’ve gone with the book for this one.
> 
> 2) Spiker, deep down, knows she and her sister are as bad as Sandra, and she knows she’s treating James unfairly; I’m not disputing that. But that is all definitely happening unconsciously. She isn’t aware, consciously, of those things. On the surface, as far as she knows, she’s still furious at James (and Lillian, and Sandra). Pretty much all the time, but ESPECIALLY when her sister is suffering, she will not try to find that knowledge, and she will remain positive that James deserves to be hurt.
> 
> Enjoy!

The  _ Jewel of the Sea  _ arrived in the port of New York City at precisely 9:27 the next morning. The disembarking process promised to be a long one, but Spiker and Sponge had no intention of waiting through it. As soon as the boat docked in the harbor, Spiker led her sister across the deck to the railing on the side of the ship facing the port and pointed to a rusted old ladder that was bolted against the side of the ship. Sponge bit her lip nervously, but nodded her assent; and the two sisters climbed down the side of the ship, successfully avoiding the long de-boarding process. With grins of satisfaction, Spiker and Sponge turned, ducked a few gazes, and strode into the heart of New York City.

The city was bright and bustling. The  _ Jewel of the Sea  _ had beaten the peach to New York, and it was so far a normal day—though Spiker and Sponge knew it wouldn’t be for long.

The two women strode forward, holding hands tightly. They were both tense and even a little nervous. Sponge’s stomach roiled and made her breath come quickly. This was another major turning point in the women’s lives, and they had to play it exactly right. The next perhaps four hours could go very well, or very poorly, and it would all depend on the quality of the performance they gave and the force of their actions.

For about an hour, Spiker and Sponge tried to get a general scope of the city, and they were immediately surprised by the difference in reception. Both of them were beyond used to staring straight ahead to avoid hostile glares, but in New York almost nobody even glanced in their direction, preferring to focus on going about their own days. It was an interesting feeling, and a surprisingly very nice one. They walked for about four miles, marveling at the skyscrapers and the cars, at the electric streetlights and the high-rise apartments, without having to face one insult flung in their faces.

At one point Spiker and Sponge, completely by accident, stumbled upon an entrance to Central Park. A few steps into the lush green preserve and it was like a whole new world. The bright green foliage existed in stark contrast to the dull gray streets, yet they were just a few feet away from each other. There were horses pulling carriages trotting through the park; there were rabbits, squirrels, and deer bounding through the woods; there were children scrambling around on rocks. A few waved and called out to Spiker and Sponge; they smiled and waved back. Near the exit of the park, Spiker picked up a weatherbeaten old umbrella, thinking it might come in handy; she didn’t know what was coming, and, if worst came to worst, the umbrella could be used as a missile.

At about 10:30 Spiker and Sponge walked back out of the park and towards the Empire State Building, which was about a mile and a half from the park. They were getting pretty close to the monumental skyscraper when one woman’s scream rent the air, immediately followed by many others. Instantly a panic swept through the crowd; people were pointing up at the sky, their faces white. Spiker and Sponge shot each other a quick glance, confirming what the other knew: the people were terrified of a flying bomb that had just entered the parameters of the city. It was visible in the sky now, probably about two miles away and fifteen hundred feet up. Suddenly everybody began running and yelling; the streets were in complete bedlam. People were swept up and tossed around in the flow of bodies; it was a fight to get anywhere. There were cries going up to take shelter in an underground subway station, which could hypothetically become a makeshift bomb shelter. People were rushing to get anywhere inside: into the lobbies of museums, buildings, and the apartments and hotels that littered downtown. The lucky few already inside were quickly herded down to the basement; everybody else was directed up and up, into the higher floors of the building. Spiker was rather doubtful that being inside but high up was actually at all safer than being outside; after all, if the building was bombed, they would fall. However, people clearly weren’t thinking straight, and continued to pour into the upper levels of the tallest buildings.

In a few minutes, the streets were almost completely barren, save for a few people sprinting around trying to find shelter. All of the cars, taxis, and busses had been abandoned as their drivers and passengers fled to what they perceived as safety. Spiker and Sponge were left alone on the street with only a few other stragglers. They glanced at each other; then Spiker grabbed her sister’s hand and pulled her into the doorframe of the Empire State Building. They didn’t try to enter the building, but only stood in the doorway, pressed against the wall. Here was as good a place as any to see what transpired.

Spiker and Sponge watched as the peach flew steadily closer to the building itself. They could see the people on top of it with more clarity now; and the closer the peach got, the less and less they looked like human adults. They almost looked like… 

_ “Insects,”  _ Spiker finally breathed. She’d suspected it for quite some time now, but had been too skeptical to say it out loud. Now it was clear, though. Now it was obvious the passengers were giant bugs. “A giant peach is going to attract giant bugs.” Her voice was harsh, quiet, disbelieving. But it was true.

_ “What?”  _ Sponge’s body jerked; she was terrified of nearly all insects of all shapes and sizes. Spiker felt goosebumps sprout up on her sister’s skin.

“It’s okay,” Spiker breathed, her voice still tense. “Giant bugs, humans; it’s the same—”

“No, it’s not!” Sponge’s voice was shrill; she was squeezing Spiker’s hand with all her might. “Bugs are animals!  _ Giant  _ bugs are monsters! They’re dangerous and they’re a threat!”

“Well, they’re clearly not too dangerous, because they haven’t eaten James,” Spiker rationalized, her heart rate slowly returning to normal after the shock. “We’ll just have to assume they’re humans, but… not human… until they prove otherwise.”

The peach was about six thousand feet away, still in the sky. Then Spiker and Sponge saw it slowly begin to descend as a few seagulls either broke away from the top or were cut free. The peach kept flying forward, though dropping gradually as well. But then, just as the peach flew directly over the Empire State Building itself, something else happened.

The normal early-morning commuter’s flight from Boston to New York, which hadn’t been postponed because of the bomb threat, swept overhead. Spiker and Sponge saw what was about to happen perhaps five seconds before it did. It didn’t prevent the occurrence, but it meant it shocked them significantly less.

The plane plowed right through the strings that held the seagulls to the peach. It cut them all straight through, meaning the peach suddenly had nothing pulling it through the air. 

The peach plummeted towards the earth. There was an audible cry of horror from the people inside the Empire State Building (the bomb was falling right on them!); only a glass door separated the panicked throng inside the skyscraper from Spiker and Sponge. The oversized orange fruit began to pick up even more speed as it fell, whistling through the air as it dropped. Spiker and Sponge pulled themselves flat against the Empire State Building’s glass door, away from the open space, their faces twisted in anticipation…

And all of a sudden then there was, of all things, a squelching sound from above. Spiker and Sponge stayed where they were for a second; then, propelled by impulse, they stepped out of the doorway and looked up.

The peach was stuck on the top of the Empire State Building. The building’s spire was sticking straight through the peach; well, slightly off to the left, missing the enormous pit. It was not moving. It was not falling. It was just sitting there, the spike impaled in it.

Spiker and Sponge just stood there, staring. Then Sponge pulled her sister back into the doorway. “Let’s see how—if—they get down.”

Spiker nodded and held her breath. For a few seconds nothing happened. But then a ladder dropped over the side of the building, from the top of the spire; it obviously originated from the peach. The ladder appeared to be made from spun silk. Spiker stared at it for a second before realizing.

“That’s spider’s silk. There’s probably a giant spider on the peach.”

Sponge closed her eyes in horror, her face white. Normal-sized spiders were bad enough, but enormous ones were even worse. Spiders were the worst of the worst, the worst type of bugs to ever exist. There was just something about their faces… and their  _ legs _ … and the way they moved that was beyond creepy.

Spiker squeezed her sister’s hand. “Just calm down,” she whispered. “They’re not savage. They haven’t eaten James. Let’s just see what happens next.”

What happened next was that the first of the peach’s passengers began to descend. Spiker and Sponge could do nothing but stare in absolute shock. They were still pressed against the doorframe, mostly out-of-sight unless somebody actively looked for them.

The first passenger was clearly a grasshopper. But he didn’t look anything like a normal grasshopper. The first thing was he was extremely oversized; he would see eye-to-eye with Spiker, who was slightly taller than her sister. Everything about his body, not just his height, was magnified. It was completely disconcerting and off-putting, and would have made anybody who wasn’t expecting it faint.

But there was also something else about this giant grasshopper that was different. There was just a look in his face; in his eyes, especially. Spiker and Sponge could tell from looking in his eyes that he was not a normal green bug. He was far too civilized. He was  _ smart.  _ The look in his eyes was human, was comprehending and clever. Analytic. Perceptive.

The Grasshopper was not just a grasshopper. Spiker and Sponge could sense it immediately. And that had as much to do with his mental state as his physical one.

As soon as his feet—were they even called that?—touched the ground, the Grasshopper reached out a hand to help another bug off of the silk ladder, which was swaying slightly in the gentle breeze.

This next bug was a ladybug. And while she, too, was terribly oversized (in her case, over four feet tall), the thing that differentiated her from other ladybugs was also the look in her sharp black eyes. Her eyes showed human emotions: alertness, cleverness, concern, love. She really couldn’t be called an insect anymore. Mrs. Ladybug was different.

Spiker and Sponge were both breathing heavily, looking at the not-quite-really-insects in front of them. They had both known that the passengers were going to be very oversized bugs, but knowing that and  _ seeing  _ them were different. The bugs were extremely scary up close. Seeing a grasshopper five hundred times larger than it normally is, is not an everyday sight. And it threw both women.

But at the same time, they weren’t as scared as they would have been if the Grasshopper and Mrs. Ladybug had acted like a normal grasshopper and ladybug. They were definitely both mentally humans, and that made them much less threatening. It didn’t mean they were any less  _ shocking _ , though. Their sheer size was enough to be a surprise.

The next bug down appeared to be a silkworm. She nearly fell off the second-to-last rung of the ladder, but Mrs. Ladybug was quick to steady her. The Silkworm gave her a quick look of thanks before stepping off onto the ground.

The next passenger to climb down the ladder was not an insect. He was the one human who had travelled on the peach, the one passenger who Spiker and Sponge had any connection to. He was the one they wanted, the one whose life they desired more than anything to control again. James climbed down the ladder with an agility neither of his aunts had seen before; he was laughing and calling up to somebody descending the ladder after him. As James neared the ground, he stood on the fifth rung from the bottom and jumped, grinning. At once, the Grasshopper and Mrs. Ladybug reached out to steady him, but he hadn’t stumbled. He smiled up at the two of them and took one of their hands in each of his own. Mrs. Ladybug said something softly to him, and James burst out laughing. Spiker and Sponge looked at each other, a long, measured look. So now they knew the bugs could talk.

The two women caught the next passenger’s words as he stepped off the ladder and turned to face the group. “And just  _ what  _ did you say about me, Mrs. Ladybug?” the Centipede said crisply, but with a twinkle in his eye. Mrs. Ladybug cocked her head mysteriously, but it was James who answered.

“She said you’ve got forty-two legs and you still didn’t look any more comfortable on that ladder than her or Grasshopper! She said it was ‘pitiful’.” James laughed; the insult was clearly all in good fun.

“Excuse me, my appendages total one hundred, Ladybug,” he said; again, his face was hard, but it was clear he was laughing inside. “And the way you climbed that ladder, I’d have thought you were going to fall at any minute!”

“Oh, are we discussing Centipede’s atrocious climbing abilities?” Miss Spider said shrewdly, stepping off the ladder next. “I’m far more adept than he is.” Spiker felt Sponge tense up next to her; she ran a hand comfortingly through her sister’s hair. “It’s okay,” Spiker whispered. “She’s not like most spiders. She’s smart and clever. She thinks like a human; she just looks like a spider. Don’t think of her as a spider, think of her as a human.” And Sponge relaxed slightly; only very slightly, but she relaxed just the same.

“Of course you’re a better climber, Miss Spider, it’s your very own web!” snapped the Centipede. “But the rest of us aren’t so privileged to be able to climb on something we spun ourselves and have been scrambling around on all our lives—”

“But you  _ are  _ able to climb on something, at least, which is a relief,” Miss Spider said, “because without my web you’d still be stuck on the top of the Empire State Building.”

“Silkworm contributed too,” James reminded the group fairly. “So it’s not only Miss Spider’s web she was climbing on, Centipede.”

“Oh, are you on Miss Spider’s side, too, James?” The Centipede swept James up in six of his arms and tossed the boy into the air. James laughed as the Centipede deftly caught him again. 

Finally a giant Glow-worm stepped onto the ground, an Earthworm curled around her waist. As she walked over to the group, the Earthworm unraveled from around her and slithered to the ground, immediately bursting into a tirade of complaint about how terrifying his descent from the top of the peach had been. The Glow-worm rolled her eyes at the others and said, “He was panicking the entire way down. He was certain we were going to fall.” The rest of the insects chucked.

“So,” Spiker whispered as the insects began to form a tighter knot, contemplating what to do next; they were clearly not waiting for anyone else to come down the ladder. “That’s all of them, then. Seven insects and one little boy.”

“Have you seen those bugs?” Sponge’s voice was shrill with horror. “They’re enormous! We don’t stand a chance against them!”

“Sponge.” Unlike her sister, Spiker was quite calm. “If they were humans that size, would you be scared?”

“No! But these aren’t humans!”

“They’re only bugs physically, Sponge. And what they look like physically doesn’t really matter at this point. Treat them like humans, because that’s what they are mentally. Humans, we can deal with.” 

Spiker let her sister’s hand drop and squared her shoulders. She gave her sister a brave, resolute nod, then locked her arms at her side and walked out of the doorway. She took a few strides closer to the clump of bugs that included her nephew; then, coldly, opened her mouth. Spiker’s voice, dripping with venom, rang out clearly around the deserted street.

“Hello, James.” 


	14. Forgive, Don’t Forget

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1) I cannot put into words how terrified I am to post this! I feel a lot of pressure regarding this chapter... I’m so nervous to share it... But I really, REALLY hope you like it!
> 
> 2) I learned a new word!  
> “Latent” - present but not visible, existing as potential; remaining in an inactive or hidden phase, dormant; existing in unconscious or dormant form but potentially able to achieve expression. Adjective form: “latently”

Instantly every one of the insects, as well as the women’s nephew, spun to face them. James let out a cry, of terror, of shock, of a thousand other things neither Spiker nor Sponge could place. His face a mask of horror, he shrank back against the rest of the insects. Mrs. Ladybug, on his left, cradled his body against hers, running a gentle hand through his hair; the Grasshopper wrapped two strong arms around James and put another hand comfortingly on his shoulder. 

Spiker, undeterred, kept walking forward, her hand gripping the umbrella handle with all the force she could muster. “Oh, my dear, darling nephew,” she crooned succulently, clearly faking it, her head tilted to the side. She could have acted perfectly sweet, perfectly kind, but at this point it wasn’t even worth it. She wanted to hurt this little boy, and she knew it, and everybody else knew it, too. The mock kindness was just for show; it was just to shake the boy, just to unsettle him.

Sponge advanced another step, by her sister’s side. “It was very naughty of you to steal our peach,” she said softly, mock-sweetly, to her nephew.

The Grasshopper put a hand in front of James’ chest, blocking his aunts from reaching him. “You can have the peach.”

“Oh, but we’re here for much more than the peach,” Spiker continued, still in the same tone. “We’re here to take our sister’s son back with us. We’re here to take Lillian Trotter’s son back with us—cruel, manipulative, abusive, vindictive Lillian Trotter.  _ Merciless  _ Lillian Trotter, who—”

“Excuse  _ me _ !” It was the Centipede who broke in this time. “I have never met this boy’s mother, but it is completely unacceptable for you to talk about her this way. Lillian Trotter was, at her core, a good person; if you’d just listen to what James has told us about her, you’d know that. She was a kind, sweet woman, and—”

“Oh really.” Sponge broke in now. “Well, you disgusting little insect” —she shuddered—“I completely disagree. And—”

“Oh yeah?” the Earthworm cut in, staring rather threateningly (although not quite in Spiker and Sponge’s direction, as he was blind). “Prove it. Tell us about  _ one time  _ when Lillian Trotter abused you.”

“Earthworm, James has already told us that when Lillian was younger, she—” Miss Spider broke in, exasperated, but she was cut off by James’ aunt.

“One time?  _ One time _ ?” Sponge was incredulous. “You slimy little beast, do you not understand who Lillian was? We were lucky if she ignored us—and believe me, that almost never happened. When we were only eight years old, she beat us almost every day because we did this or that, or we’d forgotten something or other. And that did not stop as we got older. She took a metal baking rack that had been inside a three hundred and fifty degree oven for hours and she held the burning metal against my arm for over thirty seconds because I’d slightly burned a cake! I  _ still  _ have the burn scars. That in no way classifies as ‘sweet,’ or as ‘kind’. And it’s not okay to do that to another human being.”  

James’ face was pressed against Mrs. Ladybug’s side, as far as possible as he could get from Sponge and her furious, snarling face. But it was Miss Spider who was staring, shocked and dumbfounded, at Sponge.

“‘It’s not okay to do that to another human being’?” she echoed in complete disbelief. “Ms. Harrisburg, that sounds  _ exactly  _ like some of the things you’ve done to James! You’ve caused him to break a leg! You’ve cut him! You’ve burned him in exactly that same way! And yet you say it’s not okay to do that to someone else? That’s—that’s  _ so  _ hypocritical!”

Sponge stared straight into Miss Spider’s eight-eyed gaze. “And we never would have done that to him had his mother not done it to us first.”

“That still doesn’t make it okay!”

James, too outraged to hold his tongue now, burst out. “Besides, my mother changed! She was sorry for that! She tried to apologize for it, but you wouldn’t listen!”

“So you’re saying we should have just plain forgotten everything she ever did to hurt us?” Spiker’s voice was cold, unrelenting: heartless.

“Maybe not! But you shouldn’t have taken it out on James!” the Grasshopper yelled in anguish. “He’s  _ ten _ ! You have no idea how much you’ve damaged him!”

“No more than his own mother damaged us!”

“That’s  _ inconsequential _ !” the Grasshopper screamed, his hands gripping James’ shoulder even tighter. “That doesn’t give you the excuse to hurt another human being!”

“You don’t know how  _ much  _ it hurt!” James cried, his voice layered with agony;“you don’t know, you can’t; it hurt  _ so much _ …”

And that was the breaking point. Spiker stepped forward and seized James by the collar. With all the force she could muster, she jerked him forward, so that he was literally ripped out of Mrs. Ladybug’s and the Grasshopper’s grips. She threw him to the ground as he cried out in pain and fear; the insects were standing stock still, staring in horror and complete disbelief.

Then Spiker raised the umbrella with the clear intention of bringing it down hard on James’ back. Her face was ugly and snarling as she jerked her arm, sending the umbrella whistling through the air towards James’ small form.

It was far too late to stop Spiker’s arm from descending. But the Grasshopper didn’t care. He threw himself to the ground on top of James, lying on top of the boy, forming a physical barrier between James and Spiker’s missile. The insect took the full force of the impact across his lower back; the sound of the blow echoed deafeningly around the silent street. But instantly the Grasshopper was back on his feet, lifting James up, clutching the terrified boy tightly in his arms. James was holding on to the Grasshopper like a koala to a tree trunk, his face buried in the Grasshopper’s shoulder. The Grasshopper strode back over to the rest of the insects, his face strong, his protective arms still gripping the little boy with all the force he could muster. 

When he reached the group of insects, the Grasshopper went to put James down. But the boy simply didn’t want to let go. He didn’t want to release his petrified clutch on the Grasshopper. He wouldn’t unwrap his small arms from around the insect.

Spiker and Sponge automatically expected the Grasshopper to force James off of his body, physically force the boy to the ground. It wasn’t cruelty that made them presume this; it was just an innocent assumption. They had no concept, no slight idea that any other reaction was even a possibility. They didn’t have any idea that the Grasshopper could react in any other way; they had just never been exposed to it. Forcing James to release his clingy hold on the Grasshopper seemed like the only possible response.

But instead the Grasshopper, sensing the boy’s fear and his reluctance to let go, tightened his grip on James. He held him with two arms now, his third free appendage stroking James’ hair. James looked gratefully up at the Grasshopper, his eyes shining with tears he was just managing to bite back. Eventually he rested his head against the Grasshopper’s shoulders, his eyes closed. Mrs. Ladybug laid a gentle hand on his back, and James seemed to melt into her touch. 

Spiker and Sponge just didn’t understand what was happening between the Grasshopper, Mrs. Ladybug, and James; especially the green insect and the boy. Why would the Grasshopper keep James in his arms? He’d  _ intended  _ to put the boy down… why was he letting James stop him from doing that? Why was he letting James interfere? What was the  _ logic  _ behind this? What was he planning? What was he  _ thinking _ ?

They couldn’t puzzle it out right now. The Grasshopper was still cradling the boy, but he looked more than ready to attack Spiker and Sponge again.

The insect waited a few moments, just staring at the women. Then he spoke, in an almost inaudible whisper. “How can you look at this little boy and want to hurt him?” the Grasshopper said, his voice pained. “How can you possibly want to torture him and threaten him and traumatize him, to make him feel like he won’t ever be loved?” Spiker and Sponge didn’t answer; the Grasshopper just stared at them through disbelieving, disheartened eyes.

The Grasshopper stroked his fingers through James’ hair one last time, then whispered in the boy’s ear. James’ face set, determined; slowly, ever so gently, the Grasshopper lowered him to the ground. The green insect put a firm hand on the boy’s shoulder; Mrs. Ladybug, Miss Spider, the Centipede, and the Glow-worm all quickly followed suit, forming a strong, unbreachable web of support and protection around James. 

Spiker and Sponge could do nothing but stare at the bugs. Why on earth were they all so protective of James? Why did they care about him at all? He was just a little boy, just a nuisance; what could the insects possibly gain from having a weak, sensitive seven-year-old boy tag along after them everywhere? What was their motivation? Why did they bother keeping him? There seemed to be absolutely no tangible benefit from having him there. So  for goodness’ sake, why hadn’t they eaten or abandoned him long ago?

The Grasshopper took a slight step forward, his eyes blazing. “You really don’t know how much you’ve hurt him, do you?” he whispered to Spiker and Sponge, who stared back, refusing to break the insect’s gaze, trying to understand him. 

_ Why do you care about James at all? _

“You don’t know what it’s like for him!” the Grasshopper continued, his voice rising with anguish again. “You don’t know what it’s like, when he wakes up screaming from the nightmares, when his first thought is to stifle his cries because he’s afraid he’ll be punished if he’s heard, when he immediately takes comfort in himself, and only himself, because he thinks there’s nobody else who will show him sympathy. How can you relish seeing him feel like that? How can you enjoy it?”

Spiker and Sponge just stared at the clump of bugs.  _ This _ , they thought. This fierce, burning protectiveness; this blazing anger and defense of someone who couldn’t help themselves. And also this holding a child who didn’t want to be let go, this stroke of the child’s hair, this caress of their cheek. 

There was a word for this, wasn’t there?

It was tottering on the edge of both women’s consciousness. They couldn’t quite reach it… it was just out of view…

And then the word dropped like a bombshell into Spiker’s mind; the word for this protective, passionate group standing there, defending James, comforting him, holding him.

The word was  _ family _ .

And family was something that Spiker and Sponge had  _ never  _ had the liberty of having. Their only blood relations had abused them horribly, then sold them to another man, who hurt them even worse. 

But against all odds, James seemed to have people who cared about him, at least a little. They weren’t related genetically, clearly. But as the sisters stared at the group, the idea slowly blossomed that maybe a family could exist even if they weren’t related. Love could,  _ maybe _ , exist between two people with no blood in common?

But then again; unconditional love should exist between mother and daughter. And between sister and sister. And that love had never been provided from Lillian. And that was not okay, and revenge had to be taken. James shouldn’t be able escape when Spiker and Sponge hadn’t.

“Relish,” Spiker repeated venomously. “That’s the right word. And I’ll tell you why, and it’s the same thing I’ve always said. We relish hurting James because his mother relished hurting us. She  _ loved  _ to see us scream in pain, or writhe on the ground, or stand their sobbing because she’d threatened to murder us in cold blood. What we’ve done to James isn’t even the worst of what Lillian did to us. It’s only fair. You might think what we’re doing to James  is wrong. But what his own mother did to us was even wronger.”

James looked up into his aunt’s ferocious, wild eyes. And then he closed his eyes, gathering his strength for a moment, and began to speak.

“My mother never said what she did to you was okay,” James said softly. “She was very honest about it. She admitted she’d hurt you, she never tried to hide the fact that she abused you. She used the word ‘torture’. She said she’d tortured you. And I didn’t really understand much of she was trying to tell me when she still—when I—when she was alive. And for a long time even after I thought I understood it, I didn’t really, because I didn’t  _ believe  _ it. I didn’t believe she could do anything wrong. But I remember her words exactly, like it was yesterday. And I’ve thought about them, thought through them; and I understand now. I understand what she was trying to tell me. What she did was wrong; but she  _ knew  _ that. She knew it later, and she was sorry.

“She tried to apologize for it, she did! She stopped you in the marketplace that day and she  _ said  _ she was sorry. And you didn’t listen. And she said she didn’t blame you for that! It was your right! But she kept trying to make amends. She told me, she told Papa, she made it clear how much of what she did to you back then was caused by her mental state. She was destroyed by her sister’s death, did you know that? She was in agony for years. She couldn’t manage her emotions, and so she took them out on you. She knows that wasn’t okay. She knows that wasn’t right.

“As I grew up, she constantly reminded me: you may be in pain, you may be in despair, you may be in shock; but it’s never okay to do something to another person that you wouldn’t want done to you. She said, ‘I hurt my sisters, just because I was hurting. That is not okay.’ She point-blank said, ‘What I did was wrong.’ She was young and in agony. She followed her mother’s lead. And when she died she was sorry for it.

“From when I was very young, I learned that anger is never an excuse to cause pain. My mother said she was full of anger when she was younger; she said the fury was all-consuming. And she said you’re full of anger now too. She said she caused that anger. But”—James’ breath hitched slightly as tears welled again in her eyes—“she said she’s sorry.”

Spiker just stared at James, and she held his gaze for a long time. Thinking. Pondering. Wondering if her and Sponge’s abuse of James really had gone much farther than either of them knew.

_ “You have no idea how much you’ve damaged him…” _

Spiker just stared at James. She was thinking hard. The boy’s words echoed around her brain, resonated in her soul.

And then, without warning, questions began to pour into her mind. Many of them were questions that Spiker had asked herself many times. But this time, her mind didn’t falsify answers, didn’t respond with prejudice, or bias, or half-truths. This time her mind answered honestly. She had subconsciously known the truth for some time; now her mind didn’t block that from her consciousness, from her awareness. Her mind supplied the answers she had known latently for some time. And then Spiker made a difficult choice, and she forced herself to listen to those truths.

_ Did Lillian look sincere when she tried to apologize that day in the market? _

And then the honest, unprejudiced truth:  _ Yes, she did. _

It was hard, that first question, that first objective answer that wasn’t tainted by memories or personal thoughts. But once she made that effort, once she acknowledged that Lillian had made a sincere effort—once she admitted that there may have been more to the matter than she had acknowledged—questions and answers flowed into her mind. For some, the answers came automatically; some, she had to think about: but all of them she answered honestly.

_ How old was Lillian when she lost her twin sister? _

_ She was thirteen. _

_ Could that have affected her mentally more than we realized? Could that have hurt her more than we knew, damaged her from the inside out? _

_ Yes, it could have. _

_ Did we reach out and show her sympathy when she was abusing us? _

_ No, we didn’t. _

Another question, another answer:

_ Could we objectively be blamed for that, for not being sorry for our tormentor? _

_ No, not at such a young age; we were nine! _

And then again:

_ But is it still the truth that we shunned her, unaware of what she was going through? _

_ Yes, it is. _

Spiker stood, stock-still, staring at the ground with her mouth slightly open. Her brow was furrowed in deep concentration, and in realization. This was the first time she’d admitted to herself that Lillian might have even a few positive qualities that she and her sister had overlooked. This was the first time she’d admitted that she might be deceiving herself, or working off of biased facts, or hiding the truth, or being prejudiced.

Spiker had  _ known  _ those answers for years; she had, deep in her heart, known that Lillian had learned from her past and had changed. But she just hadn’t had the strength to admit it. Now, now that she did: now everything came pouring out. It was like a floodgate opening, with the water that was truth pouring into Spiker’s mind. She let herself see it, clearly and objectively, and she didn’t fight it.

It was a hard choice, but it wasn’t anywhere near as hard as discovering those truths. This? It was all mental.

There were more objective statements, too, that forced their way to the surface, and made Spiker think and gasp and cry:

_ Did James have any control over his mother’s behavior? _

_ No, he never did. _

_ Did Lillian raise James in the right way; did she raise him knowing right from wrong, knowing how to be kind and brave? _

This was the hardest admission yet to make. But Spiker knew what the answer was.  _ Yes. Yes, she definitely did. _

The final question was the most difficult of all. It made Spiker’s heart race and her body clench up just thinking about it. But once she knew the question existed, she had to answer it. And she knew perfectly what the honest answer was.

_ Were we unfair—cruel, even—to James? _

_ Yes. We were. _

There was another truth there too, half-concealed, hiding in the fog at the edge of her awareness. Spiker painfully forced it to the light, forced herself to see it. Her face changed as she realized.

And then she summoned all the strength she could possibly muster and admitted it to James.

“You have the right to hate us,” she whispered, staring into his face. “You have the right to look at us and want nothing more than to see us suffer. Because—James, we hurt you.” She kept her gaze locked on him, gazing straight into his bright blue eyes. And finally she found the courage to say it.

“I’m sorry,” Spiker whispered.

James broke her gaze and looked down, tears flooding into his eyes. His mind was whirring, fighting a mental battle with itself. James was an instinctively good person; he knew that Spiker’s apology had been sincere, and he knew she was truly unearthing some truths she’d never known. He knew the right thing to do would be to forgive her. But at the same time, James was not exactly eager to ignore, to forget three full years of torture and pain.

_ She  _ did  _ hurt me. She damaged me. I can’t deny that. _

James was standing in the marketplace: the same marketplace Spiker and Sponge had stood in when Lillian came up to them and begged their forgiveness. He was in the same place, had the same knowledge, felt the same things. And it would be so easy to say, “No! If you cared about me, you’d have shown it. You hurt me for years on end. And I’m not going to forgive you.” That would feel right. That would be fair, would be just; would be expected, no less. It would be normal and it would go unquestioned. It was what Spiker and Sponge had done.

But James wasn’t either of his aunts, and he never would be. He’d been raised by two loving parents who had taught him what mistakes were and ensured that he knew how to recognize them. He’d been wanted; he’d been asked for by his parents, which made all the difference in the world in how they raised him. And in the last few days, he’d found kindness again, found love and safety and comfort and solace. And… all of that mattered.

James wasn’t ready to say  _ I forgive you _ , because he didn’t forgive them, not yet _.  _ But he wasn’t going to brush off his aunt’s apology either.

His mind made up, James looked into his aunt’s face, his eyes brimming with tears, and said quietly, “I understand.”

Sponge took a few steps forward and knelt by her nephew’s side. Slowly she reached out a hand towards his face. James’ lips pressed together in apprehension—an instinctive response, since his aunt raising her hand towards him had invariably led towards pain—but didn’t flinch away. Sponge slowly ran her hand down his cheek, then tucked a stray curl out of his eyes. Then she backed up, careful not to overstep her bounds. But James smiled slightly as he looked up at her.

It hit Spiker and Sponge then, like a tsunami, like a blast from a cannon. That was one of the first times they’d ever seen James smile;  _ ever.  _ It was one of the first times they’d seen him without apprehension or pain in his face.

It was the first time he’d looked at them without fear in his eyes. 

Spiker stared at him, drinking in his gaze. What had kept James so sweet and good and kind? What had kept James so brave and true, so loyal and strong? Why had he survived years of abuse psychologically unscathed, when they hadn’t? Why didn’t he want to lash out at them?

_ It was his mother’s lessons _ , Spiker realized slowly.  _ Lillian went through that horrible period when she was a teenager, and she  _ learned  _ from that, and she passed that knowledge on to James. _

_ Lillian was angry; James says she felt like we do now. So how did she break free of that? _

“James,” Spiker whispered, kneeling down and looking him in the eye. “How did Lillian manage to overcome her anger? What was her breakthrough?”

James looked down, and there were a million things he wanted to say: how Lillian had first met Anthony, watching him win a local music competition with his talent on the violin; how she’d wanted, in that moment, so much to gain his respect; how her longing to impress him had led her to quell her  _ external  _ outbursts, bit by bit, until she could approach him; how, when Anthony met her, he began to calm her internal anger too, slowly but surely; how, as the two grew closer together, the feelings that coursed through them both left no room for terror or fury. 

But James couldn’t find the words to say all of that. And so he said what he could.

“She—she—” James breathed, still trying to articulate his thoughts. And then he found the right words.

The little boy looked up into his aunts’ eyes and said, “She realized that love is stronger than hate.” 

The words echoed around the deserted streets. Spiker and Sponge looked at each other, then at James. A single tear began to drip down Spiker’s cheek.

_ Love is stronger than hate… _

Spiker reached her hands out imploringly towards James, begging, pleading for answers. James was looking at her, and a tear slipped down his cheek too, and for a second all Spiker wanted to do was reach out and give James a big hug.

And then, from overhead, there was the sound of something ripping. And then there was a thump. Everybody in the group let out a scream as a giant hunk of peach fell from the air and slammed into the ground behind them. There was a great rumbling, as if from an earthquake; all of the group froze in terror. But then the Centipede seemed to come back to his senses, and he screamed for the rest of the insects to follow him. The Grasshopper sprang into action, scooping James into his arms and sprinting after the Centipede. The Grasshopper grabbed Mrs. Ladybug’s hand and dragged her away; the Earthworm, guided by the Glow-worm, followed; and finally the Silkworm with Miss Spider urging her along. That entire group scrambled away from the Empire State Building in perhaps five seconds; all of them were too panicked to really see what was happening.

Spiker and Sponge were panicked, too, but panic made them freeze. It didn’t usually, which was strange; but today it did, and they just stood there, eyes darting frantically around. In three seconds their fate was sealed. As they were trying to understand what was happening and what they should do, the peach finally wobbled on top of the spire and then toppled, plummeting towards the ground.

The insects shied away, but James stared straight at the scene through eyes wide with horror. A cry of “No!” was caught, half-uttered, in his throat; he desperately stretched out an arm towards his aunts; but it was too late. The peach hit the earth directly where Spiker and Sponge were standing. The sounds of their bones cracking was swallowed up by the giant rumble of the fruit crashing to the ground, and hunks of it hitting cars, windows, and other buildings. All of the insects and James were splattered from head to toe in sticky orange peach juice. Smaller pieces of peach littered the ground all around them.

And then it was over. 

Spiker’s and Sponge’s bodies lay crushed beneath the giant peach. Their hands had stilled, their hearts had stopped. No thoughts coursed through their heads; no blood pumped through their veins. 

They were dead.

At the age of twenty-eight, Spiker and Sponge Harrisburg had taken their last breaths, spoken their last words, thought their last thoughts, and squeezed each other’s hands for the last time. 

In 1934, with the twins’ birth, the Harrisburg family had been prospering. And now, less than thirty years later, they were all but gone. 

Wendell Harrisburg died in 1933, from an untreatable infection. He died alone, having rejected his wife and two daughters.

Lucille Harrisburg died in 1942, after drowning in a river. She left a grief-stricken twin, stressed mother, and overwhelmed younger sisters in her wake.

Lillian Harrisburg died in 1958, killed by a dangerous rhinoceros, an escapee of the London Zoo. She left a terrified, lost son behind.

Sandra Harrisburg died in 1959, of suicide, thinking her life was meaningless without Lillian’s mental and financial support. She died alone, never having gained forgiveness from the two daughters that survived her.

Spiker and Sponge Harrisburg died in 1962, crushed by a giant peach. They left behind a nephew who would try to analyze their lives for years to come, and eventually would deeply mourn their deaths.

And James Henry Trotter, a Harrisburg by blood through his mother, lived. He not only survived, but he thrived. He lived a great and fulfilling life, full of love and laughter and joy.

Spiker and Sponge could have enjoyed that life too, if a number of possibilities had turned out a different way.  _ If  _ Wendell hadn’t developed a serious medical problem, they would have grown up in a loving, supportive, no-stress environment.  _ If  _ Sandra had loved her younger daughters as much as her older ones, they would have felt the glowing warmth and comfort only a parent’s love can provide.  _ If  _ Lillian had gotten the grief counselling she desperately needed after her sister’s death, she wouldn’t have hurt her sisters so much.  _ If  _ Sandra had realized she was suffering from schizoaffective disorder and  _ if  _ she had gotten help, she wouldn’t have treated the twins so maniacally and cruelly, showing Lillian how to do the same.  _ If  _ Mr. O’Hara had been remotely kind, Spiker and Sponge might have felt that the entire world wasn’t out to get them.  _ If  _ they weren’t forced to make choices they so desperately wanted to avoid, they might have felt that they could find someone supportive other than each other.

_ If only… _

But it didn’t matter, because it hadn’t happened. Spiker and Sponge were dead now. They had been robbed of twelve decades of life between them. Few would remember them. And even fewer would ever truly mourn them.

But a few would. And they would not be forgotten.

 


	15. A Feeling of Peace

_Time passed mostly independently of the woman, touching her only with glancing blows. She moaned, dizzy and disoriented, each time it touched her; she found herself mostly alone in a smoky, hazy, dark space, her sister a few hundred feet away. Her head spun and her entire body felt numb; she couldn’t tell if she was standing, or sitting, or floating. She could see that her sister was standing, but what she was standing on, the woman couldn’t tell. She couldn’t see the floor, either because it was too dark or because it was nonexistant._

_The woman had no idea how much time passed in that hazy, disconnected place; it could have been days, or it could have been decades, and she wouldn’t have known. Time just flitted by, an intangible, impalpable concept, always darting just out of reach. Most of the time she was unaware of her surroundings. In the four years that passed in that weird, disconnected, disorienting place, the woman only felt a touch of consciousness seven times._

_But one day, in 1967, something changed. Something changed; not with her, but with the nephew she’d left behind. Something changed in his life. And it would inevitably change her, too…_

***

The graveyard was nearly silent; only a very faint wind blew through the willow trees that surrounded the enclosed cemetery. The day was calm: the sky above was a light, pristine blue; dull, not too bright and distracting. In the middle of the fifth row of the graveyard, a twelve-year-old boy knelt, head bowed, in front of one headstone, made of rough, cheap stone and badly weathered. The boy’s throat was tight and constricted with the force of his emotions; he lowered his head and allowed a few silent tears to stream down his face.

In his hand, James clutched a small bundle of photographs, papers, and letters. A few days ago he had received a package with a letter that informed him of the fact that his grandmother Sandra’s home—and the childhood home of his aunts and his mother—had recently, finally, been searched. It had remained empty and abandoned for years following Sandra’s death by suicide (people had been too nervous and apprehensive to venture inside). However, at last, one day in early March 1967, a group of people had searched and cleaned the place. Along with rotting food, chewed-up bedsheets, and dusty furniture, the party found all manner of scattered photographs and papers; and, once they dared to look under rugs and beneath couch cushions, they found even more. Since James was the last living relative of Sandra, Lillian, and Spiker and Sponge, many of the most personal mementos were mailed across the ocean to him.

First of all, there had been a photograph, showing a child everybody had immediately recognized as James. Except… on further examination, they discovered that the four-year-old with bright blue eyes and blonde hair wasn’t James at all, but Lillian. The physical resemblance was astonishing; James and his mother at the same age were almost identical. (In fact, they had only realized that the child in the photograph _wasn’t_ James when they unfolded the paper and saw Lucille, standing next to her twin. And of course, on the back, someone had written: _L-R: Lucille and Lillian, 1933_.)

But some sadder and more disturbing things had come in the box of momentos, too. For one, there had been the photograph of Lucille’s funeral. Kneeling at the coffin, heads bowed, were Spiker and Sponge at age eight, clutching each other’s hands tightly through fits of tears. Lillian was sobbing too, but her face was twisted in fury and anger. And beneath Sandra’s tears, on her face were the creases caused by insurmountable stress.

James had been especially captivated by that picture. James had never seen his mother angry; and while he knew that during her teenage years she had been bursting with fury and raging at the world, he’d never seen it in her body or her face or, especially, her _eyes._ And it touched him.

It touched him, too, to see his aunts, just eight years old and overcome with grief. He had never seen either of them show their emotions in front of him (save for the last confrontation in front of the Empire State Building), and seeing them so out of control with tears cascading down their faces was heart-wrenching. Whatever else they’d become, whatever else they’d done to him… in that moment, they were just two innocent eight-year-old twin girls who had lost their older sister and were in the depths of despair. And little did they know what the coming decade had in store for them. Nothing but torture and punishment and trauma and pain…

That particular picture had upset James so much that Mrs. Ladybug eventually took it away and hid it, so he couldn’t take it and stare at it and brood on the “what could have been”’s for hours on end.

The last item in the package was the most meaningful of all. It was a black leather book, obviously the beginnings of a journal. It had been dropped in water and trampled and torn, but it was still in one piece. The diary had just a few entries in it, from late 1946 and early 1947, but the few letters and notes it contained were heart-wrenching.

It was written by one of the twins; that was clear right away. And after reading only the first page, James knew that it came from Sponge. She had always been the more creative one, he said; she was the only one of the twins who could write like that. Spiker had been crisp and accurate and coldly analytical, but Sponge had talent in the arts.

The very first one—on the inside of the cover—was undated. In fact, it looked like it had been worked on over multiple days. The pencil pressure and even shade shifted slightly a few times.

_The only sound I can make these days is a scream. It can signify any number of different things — pain, horror, sadness, fear — but it’s still just a scream. That’s the only thing I can do, scream._

_I want to do more. Even if it’s cry, I want to make another sound. But it seems like the only sound that even has a chance of leaving my mouth is a scream. That pleases S &L. Of course it does._

_I scream in my nightmares too. Sometimes they’re horribly realistic. Sometimes I’m not even sure that they’re just dreams, that they're not real. And I’m all alone._

_I wake up screaming in panic and my twin sister’s there, but my mother and my older sister ignore me. They think I’m not worth their time._

_At breakfast I’ll scream in terror when I’m startled by the crash of dishes smashing on the floor, and my mother and Lillian laugh at my panic._

_After breakfast I’ll scream in pain when Lillian decides to punish me for the dishes breaking. And she and my mother, they’ll gloat, they’ll enjoy seeing me suffer._

_And it goes on. And on and on and on. I can only scream. That’s all I can do. And I don’t like it, but I can’t stop. Everything… it’s all just too much._

_I want to whisper, “Help me.” Whisper it into the silence of the night. But I can’t._

_I can only scream._

Reading that had sent James into an emotional breakdown, full of tears and rasping sobs. The insects—his family—couldn’t calm him for nearly twenty minutes, and by that time he only stopped because his throat was raw and his chest was burning. Mrs. Ladybug just held him, cradled him softly against her body as he shook, whispering and stroking his hair and hugging him tightly, willing him to understand that he was not alone. And finally, finally, James calmed.

“The thing is,” he whispered, his face blotchy, “I know exactly what she means. I… I felt like that too. I know what she’s saying, I’ve been there. I’ve felt like that before. That emotion… it’s real.”

It was real, in fact; all of the diary entries were. They were all terrible and agonizing in their own ways. There were only six passages total, but the emotion conveyed in them was enough to overwhelm and touch anyone; and their tone ranged from absolute fury to utter terror.

For instance, one entry in particular had raged, crying out in blazing anger for nearly an entire page. The first sentence had vowed to kill Lillian, and gone on to call her a monster, a demon, and a witch, among other things. It had gone on to reiterate how much the young author wanted to stab her sister and watch her die a slow, brutal death, and see her blood drip across the floor and stream down the drain. And finally Sponge said she wouldn’t rest until Lillian was dead and buried—“until she’s taken her last breath and she’s gone, and she can’t ever hurt my sister again.”

Another entry was just filled with fear; apparently Sponge had accidentally broken one of Sandra’s favorite vases and was trembling in absolute dread of the horrible, brutal punishment that would inevitably follow. And another entry had shared her anguish and terror when she’d discovered that Spiker had been horribly punished for Sponge’s own mistake and that Spiker had been keeping that to herself, not wanting to upset her sister or make her feel guilty.

James had kept the journal by his bedside, reading and rereading the entries over and over again, each time bringing a fresh bout of tears. This greatly confused a few of the insects—the Centipede, in particular, maintained that James shouldn’t feel sorry for Spiker and Sponge at all; after all, they’d put him through that same trauma and terror, and they certainly didn’t deserve any sympathy. But the thing was, while James didn’t like dwelling on those awful three years under his aunts’ care, he remembered all too well the overwhelming feelings of despair and hopelessness. And he wouldn’t wish those emotions on _anyone._ Not a soul. And as the clever and smart and analytical and empathetic child as James was,  he understood perfectly well that the only reason he’d survived Spiker’s and Sponge’s care was that he knew the world could be a kind and welcoming place. He had loving memories of his mother and father to draw back on and gain comfort from on the dark and silent nights. Spiker and Sponge had never had that, never had gentle memories to look back on; to them, it seemed as if the entire world was against them. From these diary entries, at least, that much was clear. And so of course Spiker and Sponge been more susceptible to despair and fear.

James spent days in a deeply saddened state, reading the few journal entries over and over again, tracing the words with a finger and hugging the book tightly to himself. He wanted to reach into the past and make the injustice right; but there was the brick wall of time in his way, and it made him distraught. Yet even though James couldn’t go back in time, he still wanted to do _something_ ; do something to make it right.

And eventually, James had broached the idea of a trip to his aunts’ graves to his family. They had been shocked, admittedly even a bit stunned; and they had discussed the idea privately many times over the course of several days. But eventually they decided that James could take the trip; and it might actually be a good experience for him.

So now James was kneeling in the cemetery, the photographs tucked inside the cover of the journal that he held in his hands. Tears were streaming down his young face, and when he spoke, his voice shook.

“I…” James hesitated, not quite sure how to begin. He bit his lip.

“For years I didn’t completely forgive you,” he said quietly, his eyes closed. “For years I looked back on—on those—on that time I spent with you, and I thought it was too unfair to be forgivable. I thought it would be impossible to forgive you for that. But… but now I see,” James continued, his voice now trembling even more, “that it was even more impossible for you to forgive my—my mother. What she did to you… when you started out trusting her, too… I can’t imagine it. I, at least, had _someone_ to think about and take comfort in during the worst days; I had someone who loved me. You had no one, no one except your sister. And… I just want to say… I’m sorry.”

James lowered his head, letting the tears come in full force now. “What you went through… I never truly grasped the—the magnitude of it. It was too much; it was just all too much, and too long. What Lillian put you through—look, I don’t need to say this, you know it already. But I just want to say; I never would have survived that, it’s a miracle that you did, even if you didn’t completely. And… just… I get it. I understand, I do. You wanted to punish me for what my mother—in her overwhelming and terrifying grief—did to you; you wanted revenge. I can’t say I blame you; I can’t say that idea hasn’t crossed my mind myself… if you had a child, you know? Would I want to hurt them?”

James let out a grief-stricken gasp. “You apologized to me that day, beneath the Empire State Building,” he breathed. “And… I’m sorry, too. I’m sorry for what I and my family have done to you.”

Just then a gust of wind swept through the cemetery, making a windchime in a nearby maple tree tinkle. James gasped as a few familiar notes fell from the musical chime and drifted into the air. It was from a lullaby his mother used to sing to him, which Lillian had said her own mother used to sing to her and Lucille when they were toddlers. It was a gentle, sweet song, from the earlier part of the 1920s, when Lillian had been born. The memories of Lillian singing it to James had gotten him through the worst of his worst days: the days when he cried himself to sleep, shivering in his tiny room in his aunts’ house; the days when he could think of nothing but Spiker scoffing at him and telling him he’d never be worth anything; the three awful days just after his parents’ deaths. James had held onto that song and the memories that came with it, and no matter how painful the words of the song could be to him (depending on his mood), it had gotten him through some of his most brutal experiences.

 

_When Nurse has tucked the bedclothes in,_

_And stomped across the floor,_

_She says there’s not a single soul_

_Can come in through the door._

 

_But only me and Mick the dog,_

_Who lies along o’ me,_

_Know why the skylight’s open_

_And what we’re going to see._

 

_For when the sun has gone to sleep_

_And all the world’s in bed,_

_Then someone comes to see us here,_

_Whom Nursey says is dead._

 

_Dad used to call her Darling Heart,_

_But Mother was her name._

_And me and Mick were very sad_

_Before our Mother came._

 

_She comes in through the skylight,_

_For the door is not allowed._

_Her eyes are bright as little stars,_

_Her dress is like a cloud._

 

_She hold me very kind and tight_

_And talks about her land,_

_Where all the flowers are boys and girls_

_With mothers close at hand._

 

_But when I want to go with her,_

_She says ’twould never do,_

_“For Daddy would be lonely here,_

_Without a boy like you.”_

 

_The soft, sweet notes of the lullaby drifted, ever so slowly, through the dark, black expanse that the woman and her sister were trapped in. The woman felt something clog in her throat and she gasped. The words, the tune—everything about it was so painfully familiar. The woman’s older twin sisters had sung that song to her when she was incredibly young; they claimed their mother had sung it to them. After Lucille’s death, Lillian had stopped singing, and the woman never heard the song again. Or, at least—not out loud. She remembered it for years with perfect clarity._

_The woman had always found the song infuriating: hypocritical and fake. She’d felt as if it was trying to take something away from the pain felt by death. It was falsifying the concept for children who had never been through it, and—worse—it was convincing kids who_ had _that their lost loved ones were still somehow alive, just in another dimension or another place, and that they still cared._

_Well, that was utterly and completely untrue, the woman knew, and had always known. Death meant death, and nobody could sense the other side. The lost were dead and gone. You’d never hear their voices again or see their gentle smiles. You’d never feel their arms around you or hear their laugh. And, most of all, they would never come back to comfort you and tell you that they were okay, safe and warm. Because they weren’t. They were cold and alone, and they’d never breathe again. They were dead, simple as that._

_The woman knew what death felt like. At eight years old she had cried by her older sister’s coffin, clutching her twin and shaking horribly with the force of grief and pain. She knew that Lucille was gone forever and that she wouldn’t come back. Making a song about somebody who would come back? That was pouring salt in the woman’s wounds. It made it even worse._

_But now, as the gentle strain of the melody floated through the woman’s mind, she found that she wasn’t filling up with any of the usual anger that accompanied the song. No—this time she found it calming, oddly relaxing. It was only the notes, not the words, that she heard; and it gently, slowly began to calm her. She gasped slightly with the serenity—something she hadn’t felt in what seemed like forever._

_And then, all of a sudden, with such gentleness, the woman heard a young voice begin to sing…_

***

Under his breath, and ever so gently, James began to sing the words of the melody. The lyrics stirred up dark, painful memories; but they also brought with them comforting and warm ones, images of James’ parents and their old, cozy house, and when they used to sing it to him as he gently drifted off to sleep…

***

_The woman gasped as the voice became clearer, crisper. She recognized it immediately as her nephew’s voice: much older than she remembered—probably around fourteen now—but still just as gentle. The woman hadn’t heard any of what the boy said before, kneeling between her and her sister’s grave, but she inexplicably felt it now: not in words, but in—well, just raw emotions._

_She felt the boy’s grief at discovering the journal, at uncovering the painful memories of what had happened to the woman and to her sister. She felt James’ despair and his overwhelming want to somehow make it right. She felt his grief and his admission that he completely understood her choices._

_Suddenly there was another voice, joining in the song; two, in fact, similar-sounding but not identical. They were young, too, not more than perhaps twelve. Lillian and Lucille. Lucille’s voice dropped down to sing a harmony she’d composed, as she often did; Lillian held the melody. The woman suddenly remembered the flash of a moment, of a scene: the first time she really remembered hearing her sisters sing together. She had been six, and her sisters had stroked her hair and rocked her to sleep next to her sister._

_As the song drew to its melodic, gentle close, James lifted his head and ever so gently spoke again. This time, the woman could hear it clear as day._

_“What I’m trying to say is,” he choked, still with tears in his eyes—_

***

—“is that I forgive you. And I hope”—James gasped, his throat tight—

***

—“ _I hope that someday, you can forgive me.”_

***

James felt a stirring in the back of his brain as a familiar voice spoke softly; but from where he couldn’t guess—

***

_“Of course.”_

***

Suddenly the boy was flooded by an inexplicable sense of relief; some of it was his, he knew, but some of it came from somewhere else. And then… it was gone, replaced by a sense of peaceful finality—

***

_The woman felt serenity flood through her, and then she slowly began to fade out of existence: both physically and mentally. With a gentle sigh, she took what was truly, finally, after all this time, her last breath._

_But the last feeling in that ghostly, misty, hidden chamber, wasn’t one of loss or fear or pain, like the vast majority of the woman’s life had been. No; instead it was a feeling of gentleness, of understanding, of forgiveness._

_And the woman could just barely put a name on the sense before she disappeared, on the feeling she’d almost never felt in her entire life…_

_Peace._

_And then she was gone._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, so this seems to be the end! It’s been a long journey here. I still have some minor editing to finish up, but for the most part, this is the definitive version! I’m not done with these characters and their storylines, and I’m definitely not done with the JATGP universe; but this seems to be the major end of this story. Thanks to everyone who’s read this and left kudos (and thanks especially to Demonwolf88 for unending support and advice). It really means a lot.
> 
> Thank you!


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